I woke up at 9:15, thanks to the earplugs that recently came in my first care-package from my mamma. My room was so messy, and usually when I look at my disaster of a room it gives me less and less desire to clean it, but for some reason I changed that day. I started a load of laundry, and by load I mean I took some clothes and put them in a bucket with soapy water to sit for a few hours until I could wash them by hand. Laundry is my least favorite of houseworks to do, like I recently told my friend Kax (say caash) who promptly laughed at me. But it’s one of those things that has to get done eventually because people here really REALLY notice when you’re not wearing clean clothes. Oh yeah, and I kinda like to wear clean underwear, too.
After starting my laundry, I decided it would be a good time to go for a run, because it was really sunny and beautiful out and I had nothing better to do. I put on my sunscreen, my hat, and my poor tennis shoes that need so badly to be replaced and I headed out for an hour. Now, when I say run I really mean walk/jog/run because I can’t actually run for an hour straight. Plus, the roads here are all dirt and rock and I have a tendency to roll my ankles easily, so I walk the flats and down-hills and sprint all the up-hills. While out walking, I somehow had forgotten how beautiful it is here, even on the roads, even with all the hillsides covered in milpa (corn plants, which by now are brown and more or less void of corn because they’ve all been plucked to dry by now), and even though the scenery doesn’t really change for kilometers, I still like it.
I got back home around noon and, rather than putting off doing my laundry, I finished it all! Then decided it was such a beautiful day so I set out again with my salmon-pink bucket to go collect more composting worms. I walked about 15 minutes to the base of a hill called Chun, atop which has a ceremonial Mayan Altar. At the base of Chun there’s cow pasture that belongs to Don José, the father of my counterpart, whom I happen to also live with. Nobody is every really bothered about things like trespassing; as long as you don’t take something that doesn’t belong to you you’re more or less free to wander through whosever land you happen upon. I figured that taking worms out of cow poop doesn’t really count as taking something that doesn’t belong to me.
Photo 1: My hand with a couple of the larger worms. They're not stretched out so you can't see how big they really are, but I'd say a good 8 inches. Plus they're laying a lot of eggs now.
Photo 2: The bucket I keep my compost in for now. I'm working on the design for a fancier home made out of wood but I keep coming across different styles and I'm not sure the one I want to make!
Photo 3: My backyard where I keep the bucket (the green plastic is to keep the rain out and keep the worms from drowning, as they did in my dream the night before which is what actually provoked me to go and check in on them). They're all happy, healthy, and gorging themselves on moldy hummus and horse poop now.
An hour and about 200-300 worms later I returned to my house to have a snack. I ate and relaxed for a little and when I went downstairs I was told that my friend Kax had come looking for me. I grabbed my basketball, put on my sports clothes and headed towards his house which was also in the direction of the soccer field. His sister said he wasn’t at home but by now I’d seen a bunch of other young guys heading down to the field so I went to join them. I met up with about twenty other people on the field and we divided in to teams and started to play. I’m not very good, but I did save my team two goals! The first one I was on defense close to the goal posts and the offender Yobani afterward told me “I thought I had a good shot, but there was Katy and I didn’t want to hit her”. The second save was much better. A corner kick: we were all lined up around the goal and one of the offenders next to me headed the ball right toward the center of the goal, luckily, it hit my head first to deflect it off-path and out of bounds. Everybody laughed. I was glad I could actually do something useful.
After the game ended I walked back home with some of the other players who live around my house. It was still light out and my neighbor Luis was sitting outside playing guitar. I joined him for a little bit but it was getting really cold so promptly decided to go inside. I took a hot shower and made guacamole and beans with cheese for dinner and went to bed early.
Like I said, it was a good day.
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