Because you can live off-campus for the rest of your life...

…and now I finally am. I share a house with 5 other girls—interesting, intelligent (ivy-league!), fun girls that like to cook, sit on our porch, and spend time together. Boards on cinder blocks line two walls of the largest room in our house, forming a long desk where our own space is marked by our teacher title (Miss Sarah) on an index card taped to the wall. Our afternoons and evenings thus far have been spent sitting at our long mutual desks planning lessons and sharing ideas and resource books. We pass around the internet cord to take breaks and write emails, and take turns playing music. We go shopping for food, cook meals, and do dishes together. It reminds me very much of my time spent in the dining room and living room at Koinonia—minus the boys and discussions of theology. We do have our fair share of interesting conversations. For example--this is a conversation from the other night: “I want a wedding! But I don’t want a husband. I mean, what girl doesn’t want a wedding. It is all about you. You dress up like a princess and everyone basically worships you. I want to be pregnant, but I don’t want a child. You get to eat whatever you want and people rub your feet.” :) We laugh a lot. It is interesting to live with girls that come from such different experiences.

The past two mornings (Have I really been in Honduras for only 2 days?!?!) have been dedicated to scaring the spiders out of my classroom and sweeping away the 2 inches of dust and bug carcasses covering every surface. It is near impossible to imagine preparing a classroom in the States instead of what I am doing here. If you haven’t figured it out, my time has mostly been spent planning lessons and preparing for school. But no worries, I’ve already spent time with the neighbor women making tortillas, dancing at a birthday party for the school’s Honduran principal, and commuting by way of pick-up truck bed. There’s always time for fun.

There are also things that make life interesting around here...

Dogs bark all night long and then when they bark at you during the day they are hoarse and you say to them, “Stupid dog, you shouldn’t have barked all night long.” I, thankfully, I don’t hear them barking at night because of my wonderful, powerful fan.

Getting up early hasn’t been such a problem for me because of the two hour time difference. We get up around 7, but I feel rested because it is 9 Michigan time!

We have to use a wrench to work both our stove and our toaster oven. On the stove it turns the temperature knob which has no numbers on it, but I hear that turned to 2pm is great for cake. We joked about using a permanent marker to label the knob with the word “cake” and maybe even go farther to label “chicken” and other random dishes right there on the knob. The wrench holds the lever down on the toaster oven so that the toast will cook. The problem the lies in the lack of a timer so there have been some pieces of toast that have gone on the wayside.

Also, our water disappeared for a few hours only to be found out that there is a switch on the side of our house that anyone (including the children in our neighborhood…ahem) can turn to the right and shut off our water if ever they want to get the gringas riled up :)

That is all I have time to write now!