So just when I thought I was used to the animals and stuff and I could handle anything, my family surprises me once again! At 3:30 in the morning I was awaken by a horrible screaming. I noticed the lights were on outside of my room, so I got up to look out and see what was going on. What I saw was my host grandma holding down the head of a goat, over a bowl and my host Dad had just slit it's throat while the goat was bleeding out into the bowl. The poor goat was screaming and moaning. It was really sad, and when my host Dad wanted more blood he kept digging down into the neck. The entire time the goat was alive. I was nauceous and put my ear plugs in and tried to go back to sleep. However the rest of the morning I could hear my host Dad chopping up the goat. And when I woke up the next morning there were tons of people in our house to buy the meat. And the goats skin was thrown over a wall in the back of the house.
I get it, it's their livelihood, I just really struggle with it sometimes. I am used to chickens and turkeys being killed, but a goat really stepped it up to the next level. And the noises it made, made it even more difficult for me.
We finished up our summer school this week, one thing I didn't realize when it started how time consuming it would be, so we had to end a few weeks earlier then we thought because we have a lot of other work we needed to get started on. For the most part the classes were successful, we had about 15-20 kids coming regularly in each town. Some things we did went over way better then others. For example, we played a bingo game with pictures that we would first do in spanish, and then we started to teach them the same words in english. That ended up being somewhat successful. However, when we had made props to try and teach simple frases for "i am going to eat pizza", that went over well in my town and not so well in BJ's. It's weird sometimes what worked in one place and not the other. In the end we made pictures frames, bracelets and did a lot of coloring and the kids seemed pretty satisfied with that which was really all we were looking for. These kids have so little to do and even less to play with, so a couple times a week we were able to give them something exciting to do. Today, the last day, we handed out candy, stickers and other things to kind of finish it up. The kids seemed really confused as to what we were doing. Some kids even asked what we were going to be studying. We were really confused because we thought kids everywhere liked parties and treats, but they seemed weirded out.
My Mom sent me quite a few things to give to the kids this last week. Some of which were silly bands and bracelets. My 22 year old host sister was much more excited about that stuff then any of the kids. But once I started going through the things my Mom sent me I found glow bracelets. You know the kind that you crack and then light up. Well I showed them those...and WOW they were the most excited I've seen them about anything since I've been here. I was sad to tell them that they don't last very long, they seemed really disappointed. But the 22 year old told me that "My Mom has the most beautiful things in the U.S.", isn't that sad they feel that way about glow bracelets?
So I have a puppy now, his name is Roman. I have no clue what kind of dog he is, I just know that he is really cute. All dogs here are muts, so there is no telling anything. We took them down to the creek the other day to give them baths. I had bought some anti-flea shampoo, and my family was convinced that it was going to kill them, I had to convince them otherwise. Just like today, when I was drinking cold water that I bought in the store, they told me it was horrible because I have a cold, and I am only going to make my cold worse. Here I have all these years of education that involve anatomy and physiology and when it comes to trying to explain any of it to my family here I just can't. Stupid language barrier sometimes!
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