Hoooola,

Sorry it has been so long since I wrote anything. I´m finally in my permanent home for the next two years. It is a community of maybe 100 households near Altamira, Puerto Plata (province). You can find Altamira on google maps. It´s between the cities of Santiago and Puerto Plata.

So, the strangest thing that has happened is that my host mother died of a heart attack while I was in the capital for a week finishing training. Although I had hardly met her she was really nice and loved by the whole community. my host family and the community are finishing up the fairly intense nine day mourning process tomorrow. The ninth day event is called a vela (candle...). I´ll try to report on what it was like later on, at the very least we´re expecting about 400 people to be there. The family killed two pigs this morning for the event, which was interesting.

I have a house sort of two myself next to my host family. My host brother, Manuel, stays with me and sleeps in the second bed. He and everyone else in the very large extended family are very nice, feed me too much, and have made me feel very at home. I´ve begun my project sort of slowly because of the death of my Doña, but none the less, it´s going well. We´ve measured the flow in the water source, visited lots of homes, and had some water comittee meetings.

Some of the more fun things i´ve done include climbing an orange tree to ´tumbar´- tumble oranges to the ground, collected plantains, learn to chop firewood dominican style, and yesterday helped rebuild a letrine. Today I´m in Altamira to get some money to pay ´rent´, buy a machete and measuring tape hopefully, and use some internet. It´s a beautiful motorcycle ride between my community and Altamira up and down the small hills-mountains on a rural paved road. The economy in the area seems to depend a lot on harvesting cacao and coffee beans from the forest. So I regularly drink amazing hot chocolate and coffee. I´m going to try to process my own chocolate and coffee from start to finish.

well, gotta go, I´ll have to send some pictures later.

'Ryan