Home Sweet Home (written 9.2.08)

It has scorpions, it has leaks, it has termites and a cat that's not quite a fan of me…but hey! It's home!

After cleaning 50 years worth of old people junk out of a house that hadn't been lived in in over 2 years, with much help from friends, I moved all of my things into my new old home. Perhaps a little prematurely, I got a kitten on the same day, thinking we could keep one another company. He actually hid under my bed for most of the first day (who can blame him after riding to his new home inside an old rice sack on the back of a motorcycle?) but has gotten continually braver, and is definitely showing an interest in getting to know me. He's an orange tabby (is there any other kind?) and I call him Chinola - a yellowish, bittersweet fruit that makes great smoothies!

After a tiring weekend of diversity camp, run by Peace Corps volunteers and to which I took two girls from my community, I returned home on Sunday and set about making house into home. After waking up luxuriously at 9 (it's hard to drag oneself out of bed when it hasn't stopped raining in about 24 hours), I cooked an American breakfast, finished a book, and made fresh squeezed orange juice out of 20 oranges a neighbor brought me (I'm pretty sure they came off the back of "my" property somewhere). Although the streets have turned to mud, I eventually made my way down to my host parents for a late lunch, where there sat awaiting me on the dining room table a heaping portion of pig intestines. Sure, it sounds exotic when you call it "mondongo", but that doesn't make it any more digestible. I managed to swallow one piece, discreetly fed the rest of what was on my plate to the ugly turkey that hangs around out back, and managed to get out of the house about 30 minutes later without my host mom saying something about how little I had eaten. Crisis averted! I had heard tales of this mondongo, and even seen it transported in buckets on buses, but until this rainy Tuesday afternoon, had never been presented with it as a solitary lunch option (with rice, of course). It kinda looked like large, grey, floppy cheerios in a red sauce. The texture, rubber tire. The flavor….let's not go there. Luckily I wasn't that hungry, and I have an assortment of vegetables to cook for dinner tonight (if I can find a cooking pot in my decrepit kitchen) as well as fresh squeezed orange juice.