Am I...making this up? Today we made bread for my family to sell. I was watching my aunt knead a mass of dough the size of a toddler in a big plastic bowl. She pieced it out in hunks and gave it to my cousin and myself to knead further on top of some elevated wooden planks. Bathing my hands in melted grease and pulling at the white-ish elastic mass, I looked over my shoulder at a gigantic beehive oven. The heat waves pealing off the sides were almost unbearable in this morning's ninety degree weather. The chickens...always the chickens. I looked at them as they poked their way out from underneath a nearby table, the little ones weaving in and out underneath our feet. And that's when I took stock of what was going on, of the whole past week and I thought...This is definitely a dream.
I think it's just because so much lately has been outside my normal frame of reference that I keep having moments where I'm like, “Naw, this can't be real.” But do people really dream outside their frame of reference anyway? I've dreamed I was a deep-sea diver in an old fashioned diving get-up. I was attacked by sea snails in that dream and I sunk to the bottom of the ocean, my air hose coming loose from the hands of the people on the surface. I've never done that, but I know what one of the suits looks like, I know that sea snails exist. This whole world here in rural Costa Rica is something I never could have imagined. Ever. There are things here too complex, too good, too gross. I'm totally fascinated and overwhelmed by it because it's just. So. Real.
I don't know if my schedule will stay like this, but I can give y'all a glimpse of what a day in the life of Lily/Kathleen has been like. Since Monday, I get up around 7:00am and then feel instantly guilty for being a late riser and a non-exerciser (that's what living in the Central Valley on a Peace Corps Training schedule will do to you). I shower, put on bug repellent, and get dressed. The first meal is probably my favorite part of the day – my host mom shows me how to cook something new every morning so far, and now I make tortillas as part of a balanced breakfast. I get gallo pinto, too, which makes me immensely happy. From 8:00ish to 10:00ish I sweep and mop my house/patio and wash my clothes from yesterday. Then, I usually try to read some on the front patio.
This has not worked out so well – there are a million kids around and they're not yet bored with me. So they ask if I want to go to the river and we go to the river. They ask if I want to go to see the school and we go to the school. I ask if they're tired yet and they say no, let's go see the cows.
So that's until lunch, when I sometimes manage to shake 'em off. Lunch is usually awesome, there's no other word for it. I sit and play with my ten month-old niece and talk with my host mom. In the afternoons there's been people to meet or errands to do. It rains after that, and I get some blessed alone time since everyone goes home during the rain. Mom might call from the U.S. or I'm texting with another Volunteer. However, since I live in my own house (two steps from my host mom's house, but still apart) it doesn't take long for me to feel anti-social and try to find someone here with whom to talk. Maybe there's cafecito with some aunts and uncles and cousins.
Tomorrow is my first official visit to the school and so I spent some time in the evening preparing an activity for the kids. Then, around 7:00pm it's dinner and some time spent with family at the table. After that it's not too long before I'm writing a blog and finding out that my couch is, in fact, an ant hill.
Excuse me one second.
Ok. And now it's bed time. It's the ants that sealed the deal, I can't lie. But mostly just going over how I do nothing and everything in a day makes me feel pretty beat. Within that day there are a million things that take me by surprise, or they surprise me because they feel natural already. So now I gotta sleep and dream real dreams, or rather, really dream about imagined things. Apparently a Volunteer described the next two years as “realismo mágico” and I really want to thank my AP Spanish teacher for forcing that phenomenon on us Senior year. Because I know what it is, I can appreciate the connection and it's expanded how I process even the littlest happenings. And seriously, Wikipedia that term because I can't think of anything that could be more appropriate to encapsulate the past few days. And what I'm looking forward to for the next two years!
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