Written June 30th

Most days the rain starts around two and keeps up until sometime in the night. Today though, it started pouring at ten this morning and hasn't let up. We all came back in from the fields. People stay home when it's raining here. All the footpaths turn into little streams, the clay sticks to your feet, and it gets cold. So I've been tucked in the house here, just flipping through my ngobere flash cards and playing a bunch of checkers. I drew some squares on a board and found old bottle caps to teach the kids and now they're always here to play. Just now I took a checkers break from writing.

It's been a nice day, but I worry about all of the rain days in my future. The wet season peaks in October and doesn't end until December. That'll be a lot of time in house arrest. I think I'll need a good indoors project. Maybe I could learn to weave the traditional straw hats like the old men do. Or become a virtuoso bluegrass picker on my mandolin. Or learn ngobere well and translate something into it. Read a lot or just stare blankly off into the rain. Any other ideas?

You'll probably want an update for this week as well, I suppose. Mostly rice these days, rows and rows of rice to be weeded. It's been excellent for getting to know the area and the different families. I'm getting to the point where I can find my way out off from the town to go and visit with families I don't know. In the afternoon, I go to a house and have a cup of coffee and offer to go work for them the next day. We work from the early morning until the rain and then go to the house to eat. By the time I leave, the family and I know each other fairly well. I'm trying to go work with with all the sixty families.

But the big news in Papayo these days is new corn, which is starting to trickle in. New corn is like sweet corn, but a regular grain variety. It's a bit drier and meatier and less sweet and it fills you up. We eat it raw, roasted on coals, boiled, cooked into a cream, and ground into a paste and fried. I highly recommend that you try tortoron. Drain a can of sweet corn, put in a food processor with some corn meal or breadcrumbs or something to thicken it, and then deep fry it. Senia is currently cooking a batch in the next room and I can't wait. People say that pretty soon there'll be so much new corn that I can't eat anymore. And next is new rice, which has everybody really excited. July is almost over.