hiiiiiiii! i'm still here! i have just taken some breaks for christmas, visitors (Lauren and Jonathan came!!!) and most recently parasites. AHHH! but i'm on the mend and ready to talk, so here we go:

a few weeks ago i met a cool volunteer named Cat, who is really outgoing and friendly with the kids we work with. she quickly became friends with one of the high schoolers we teach english to and got invited to walk with her and her family to the Laguna de Apoyo - a pristine lake in the crater of a volcano. Cat invited me to come along, too, so we bought stuff for a picnic and made the 2 hour hike with our student and about 7 of her siblings/cousins. it was incredibly beautiful. my job, however, was lifeguard, since the kids don't really know how to swim and the parents were terrified to even let them come. i was actually given a rope by the grandmother and told to tie up the little boy pictured above and hold the rope so he wouldn't drown. we decided against that, but i still had my work cut out for me. :) 

also, this week we finished up our summer school program of preparing kids for high school. i think it was pretty successful in that at least now they have the practical advice they'd never heard before of "do your homework, be organized, study ahead for exams, etc". it's tough to send them off, because we know their parents don't know how to encourage them or help them out. but i guess we've done all we can. it was rewarding, too, to get to know these kids over the course of 7 weeks and to break through their teenage attitudes to get to know them at least a little bit. the two guys pictured above are good examples of the incredible coolness we had to deal with each day. :) 

i have this next week off of volunteering with the kids, so i'm going to be putting together some english curriculum for the organization (hmm...a course in ESL would have been useful before coming!). also i'm going to be resting, eating fruit and drinking gatorade. i've been assured that my hair will, in fact, stop falling out and the gray-ish tone will leave my skin very soon. HURRAH!!!! :)

hasta pronto.