Saturday Part One

It turns out we were not vacationing after all. Alberto had signed us up to work on a community project with the local high school, most of which speak Quitchwa. The thing about humidity is that it makes you feel sticky all the time. You take a cold shower, and you still feel sticky. You put on shorts to no avail. You put on sunscreen and bug spray? It just gets worse. This about sums up how comfortable the rainforest was for us. We were required to wear these huge rubber boots. I’m glad for it now do to all the mud and other such things were encountered, but at the time I could only think about how hot my feet were. That, paired with the long pants we were supposed to wear, made manual labor on an unusually hot day not my first choice activity. But, apparently, my opinion doesn’t matter. After breakfast we hiked to the high school to receive our assignments. Upon arrival, all of us were unhappy and ungodly sweaty. It was grand. We then got paired up with our partners, three high school kids to one of us. I was with three guys, one of which who looks astonishingly like a native version of my cousin Erik. Anyway, I ended up getting really lucky. Our job was to build this small wall thing, so basically I shoveled dirt for four hours. It wasn’t bad considering most people in my group had to lug ten-pound bags of sand up three hundred stairs over and over again. I’m not complaining. But they were. Plus, the guys I was with really enjoyed breaks, so I didn’t have to work for very long at a time. We all seemed to get along pretty well when it came to laziness. At around one, we all stopped and had lunch, while the high school kids tried to practice their English on us. It was just as confusing as the other way around. As we were sitting at lunch, and I’m told this happened to multiple girls, all three of my partners, along with KC’s partners asked me to be their girlfriend. My first reaction was “wait, what?” while I figured out what that meant in Spanish. Then, when I actually knew what was happening, I found myself thinking, “Well…multiracial babies ARE beautiful…” if only they weren’t all fifteen. KIDDING. Anyway, then we proceeded to play soccer against them, which didn’t go as badly as it did against the kindergarteners, despite the fact that our teams only footwear was a collection of rubber boots. After the game was finished (I think we lost), we walked back to home base. And took a shower. Which didn’t help. My socks were soaked. It was gross because I only brought two pairs of sock. I, however, was one of the more well off people due to the fact that I mistrust hot temperatures and so packed shorts and short sleeve shirts while everyone else did as they were told. Ha.