Written August 17th

My birthday today. Thanks everybody for the messages on facebook that I'm sure you sent. It was a good day, all around. Somehow the town found out that it's my birthday so they planned a surprise party for me. It ended up being such a surprise, that I didn't find out about until hours later. I had gone down the hill a few miles to chase rodents with Clement's

hounds, so I didn't show up until later that night. We all laughed about it.

I have a camera now (Thanks mom!), so maybe you would like to be re-introduced to Cerro Papayo.

This is the town. Several houses around the big school brought in by the government. The

rest of the people in the area live in houses spread throughout the hills, up to an hours walk from the school.

This past week I moved to a new house to get to know another family in town. I'm living with Placida, her two sons Jose (23) and Domingo (16) and Carlos (14), the son of her husband's

other wife. Did I mention that the Ngobes are polygamous? It's a much quieter house because the children are mostly past the screaming stage. And it's slightly more rustic living conditions, so I've had to get used to bathing and washing in the stream. It's a good house though. The boys are very studious and we always do our homework together in the afternoons. I help them with their English and they help me with my Ngobere.

So language learning is going poorly. There's times I feel that my studying hasn

't shown any results at all. I still don't understand much when people speak. I was further discouraged to get a visit from another volunteer who after two years still doesn't understand much. So I'm going to try harder. Today I bought a bible in Ngobere and have started studying through translations to try and get vocabulary and grammatical constructions. It makes me think of the translators, learning a language, creating a writing system, and then translating the bible. Their names aren't mentioned in the book, but I wonder where they were living and what their time was like. It was probably not an easy job.

Now most of work this week has been the usual garden and field work. In the garden I've just planted ginger with field corn and green bean vines to give shade. But my most exciting day'

s work has been on my house, trying to fix it up. We removed two stick walls and replaced them with boards and roofing tin, going from a jungle hut to the classic depression-era shack. We reinforced all the walls and replaced the sticks that were too old. Next week we work on the interior, making a bed and some tables and shelves.