Wow, so much has happened since I last wrote! First of all, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Sorry, I´m a couple days late. I hope everyone had fabulous Thanksgivings and I hope you ate a lot of turkey for me. I was supposed to eat turkey with all the volunteers, but my friend Jenn and I had a late start on Thursday. By the time we got into the Santo Domingo and checked into the hotel, it was getting pretty late. We decided to just relax by the pool and enjoy hamburgers and french fries. It was heavenly! The nice hot shower, air conditioning, and American tv stations kept us in the room too!

Well, I swore in officially as a volunteer on Wednesday. Yay me! I leave for my site tomorrow and to tell you the truth, I´m kind of scared. My Spanish is still not where I would like it to be and I´m not really sure where to start, but I have faith that God will guide me on my journey. All of my training went really well, and I´m going to miss my training group, especially those in the health group that I spent the last 5 weeks with. We learned a lot about working with people in health and giving charlas (health talks). Also, we had a lot of fun too. We found the time to hit up the beach a couple of times and a river once too.

As for my site, it´s pretty much smack dab in the middle of the country and in the middle of nowhere. I´m not allowed to say exactly where on here. If you want to know, ask my mom or dad. I have to ride on the back of a motorcycle for about 45 minutes to reach the nearest small city. Everyone laughs at my helmet on the way because no one around there wears helmets. Oh, how I love drawing even more attention to myself! My site has about 150 houses spread out, and it is very campo. There´s not much to do, but the people are extremely warm and kind. I had the chance to visit a couple weeks ago. My days were spent drinking juice, sitting in the plastic chairs on the front porch, and trying to dance Merengue in the kitchen. My host sister fell on the floor laughing when she saw my first attempts. Hopefully I´ll learn how to dance in two years! As for utilities, I have electricity sometimes but there´s no schedule. I have running water all the time though. Yay for my toilet! Unfortunately, I live in a different part of the house that´s locked up from the bathroom at night, so I´m having fun using my pee pot. Haha. I don´t have a shower head, but I´ve grown quite fond of my bucket baths and my host family is insisting on heating up water for me before I bathe. I´m not very patient though, so I might tell them that I´m used to the cold water.

Well, my internet time is running out. Please wish me luck in my site and pray that I don´t go too crazy! I´m sure it will be one wild adventure...