“There of 12 of us? We’ll need 15 lbs of Spaghetti.”

So after such a crazy adventure in the capital last weekend, I honestly don’t even think I could begin to describe to you how nice it was to come home and sleep in my own bed. So I won’t…

I will, however, tell you about how I am realizing, daily, that I don’t need to leave my site in order to find adventure, craziness and wonderful experiences to fill my days. While I’ll admit that I generally spend my mornings working out, preparing my breakfast, sweeping and mopping, and then thinking about what I want to cook for lunch, the rest of my day is pretty full (and to be honest, my mornings feel pretty full too).

This morning, however, Melissa, a fellow Health PCV who lives in Rodeo (about 3 miles from my site) invited me to join her and a friend from the US on an adventure to El Rio. I woke up early, picked a bag full of grapefruits and began my walk to Meli’s site. We then hiked about 30 minutes into the interior of her site until we arrived at a beautiful river. We did some rock-jumping into freezing cold water, bathed in the sun and ate a delicious snack of honey and grapefruit. (Note: the honey was a gift from my host father, Apolinar. This was honey straight from the honeycomb, which if you’ve never had it before, is amazing. It’s one of those things that probably doesn’t actually taste that different than a jar of honey, but because you’re chomping on a hunk of wax that was fresh from the bee-hive, it just tastes better.)

After heading back to Melissa’s house to cook lunch (a delicious chicken marinated in Sweet Chili sauce with red peppers, onions, beans, tomatoes and rice) I headed back home. Upon arrival, Juan Pedro was waiting for me with a hammer. Normal right?

Juan Pedro and I hung out at my house for a bit before meeting up with the remainder of my Escojo Mi Vida group. Today we hung up some murals, that for me were special because they were a sort of, “things coming full circle” experience. Dejame ensenarles. Way back when, during training about 4 months ago, I did my volunteer visit with a volunteer named Katie. Katie was the volunteer who started the Escojo Mi Vida group in La Culata, and so when I visited her I actually got to help paint these murals with this youth group. Today we finally hung them up! We had a lot of fun, took plenty of pictures, and managed to laugh quite a bit at how many people it takes to hammer about 7 nails into a piece of wood.

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Then we planned out a spaghetti dinner that our youth group plans on holding this upcoming Monday to have a chance to disfrutar entre nosotros. It was definitely a stressful argument while we were deciding how many pounds of spaghetti to buy and how much Cow’s Milk we would need to get, but when all was said and done, we had divided up responsibilities and things looked good.

I spent the evening visiting with community members at their homes, passed by Mantula’s house, ate dinner at a neighbor’s house and played cards with some friends. Then I brought in the nighttime with a couple of my male jovenes talking about dating, women and the positives/negatives of having one/multiple girlfriends. Clearly, it a topic of which I know a great deal.

As I finished up my day, sitting in my living room, listening to music and eating a lemon from the tree outside, I realized that I love my job. It’s days like this that keep me going.