The landslide brought it down

I read in an e-mail today that a fellow volunteer got to blow her nose with an actual Kleenex tissue yesterday, the soft kind that doesn't irritate the sensitive skin around the nose. Oh, what a treat. She and another volunteer are apparently staying the weekend at the guest house of a gringo who lives near their towns.

Rumor has spread through the chisme (gossip) chain that these two lucky girls are lounging on actual couches, not the straight-backed, wooden-armed things most houses in these rural parts have. They're eating baked chicken, too. My family doesn't even have an oven.

I bought some pirated movies from a guy in the street the other day, but ever since my computer stopped turning on a few weeks ago, I have no way to watch them. My family has a computer (no oven, but a computer, for god's sake), but my host sister sits in front of it all hours of the day and night listening to Eminen, the great white rapper, spurt profanities in English.

Still, things are getting easier here. I can sort of speak Spanish, and the kids are getting better. I made a paper-mache pinata for one class last week, and the kids nearly killed each other smacking it with a broomstick. It was fun.

I'm not hungry anymore, either, although I could always go for a tuna sandwich. I cured the hunger problem by supplementing my diet with one liter of milk per day. The supplier brings an extra case for me every week. The milk here, by the way, doesn't have to be refrigerated before it's opened, and it lasts forever in the refrigerator after it's opened. It seems unnatural, but I try not to think about it too much.

So now that I can speak Spanish and my belly is always full of ultra-pasteurized milk, my mind is left to ponder the little things I so dearly miss, like curling up on a real couch to eat baked chicken and watch movies with my cat sleeping in the crook of my arm.

I am also thinking with secret envy of my friend, Lisa, whose bedroom got hit by a landslide a few weeks ago.

Here's most of the story, straight from Lisa's mass e-mail (she even has access to Internet now):

Lisa's Landslide FAQ

Q: Oh my god, are you OK?!
A: Yes, I'm fine.

Q: Were you in your room?
A: No, we had left the house about 5 minutes earlier due to a
threatening flood. I was huddled in the chicken coop at the time.

Q: Did you lose everything?
A: We were able to rescue a surprising amount of stuff, including all
my clothes and shoes, my suitcase and backpack, and a lot of other
misc. stuff. I also saved my shampoo and soap because I thought my
host family was mooching it before, so I had it secretly squirreled
away in a thankfully high location.

One day Lisa, too, was daydreaming of lotion-infused tissues and tuna salad, when the next thing she new, she was living in San Jose right across the street from the supermarket that sells Miracle Whip.

Some people have all the luck.

Added later:

After I left the Internet cafe, I went to the supermarket, where I saw row after row of boxes of Kleenex. So, in the interest of honesty and accuracy, I want you to understand that there are plenty of Kleenexes here, but not in the poor, rural homes in which we WT volunteers reside. And if you think I'm going to spend my hard-earned nothing on a box of perfumed papers, you're crazy.