san miguel, bugbites, and bathroom doors

so here i am again typing away on sammy´s spanish keyboard. it´s mostly the same, but it has a few differences--just like jucuapa. i honestly don´t feel any culture shock really. sometimes i feel a little overwhelmed when i can´t understand what people are saying to me, but overall jucuapa is just a little town. it has internet access. i can drink and use the water--which is awesome because i didn´t know that until i got here. people understand me when i speak. and the missionary kids here; sammy and timmy from the family i´m staying with and kaitlin and taylor from the hawks; are all fairly normal teenagers. outside of keri and erica, i hang out with them more than anybody else. i´m the oldest of the whole group--even though i probably don´t act like it all the time (smile)--but they are all a lot of fun. the mks range from ages 15 to 17. keri is 20, and erica is 19. so overall, it has been a lot of fun getting to know, well, everyone.
my host family, the rogriguez family, are such incredibly welcoming people. after dinner we normally sit and talk. vivian is practicing her english, and i try to practice my spanish. in the evening we normally just hang out with sammy and timmy. we´re not supposed to go out after dark really...and dark hits around 8 o´clock down here. we did go out to get ice cream the one night after 8 because the guys were with us, but the entire town was deserted. pretty much everything shuts down in jucuapa after 8. it was weird. what else? well, the rodriguez family had a little bathroom for us outside our room. and until yesterday it didn´t have a door so we weren´t really using it. we probably could have used it and just shielded ourselves with the shower curtain, but olso, their dog, loved to run in while we were going to the bathroom, etc.
but now all is well, and we are happy to have a door.
i feel like there is so much i have to say! i´m sorry if i´m rambling on, but i just can´t help myself. today we went to san miguel to shop for the first work team that is arriving tomorrow. the supermarket was in the mall, so keri and i walked around for a little bit. i haven´t bought anything here except for food, and i didn´t buy anything today. i went into a shoe store, but i felt like the employees were surrounding me--because they literally were--and i was pretty uncomfortable, so i ended up leaving pretty quickly. me, erica, and keri are providing our own breakfast every morning out of money given to us from the missionaries. the last two days we went down to a little marketplace and bought some sweet bread and yogurt. i´d still like to do that from time to time, but it will be nice to have other options too now that i bought some food at the supermarket in san miguel. the food here is fantastic. and i am so thankful that i like beans. because i have them alot, and i still enjoy them.
and now to tell you what i am going to be doing. there is a smattering of random things and then there are the big things. the randomness is that i´ll be (hopefully) setting up a website, doing some graphic design work, and also designing some t-shirts. the big stuff is that monday thru friday erica, keri, and i will be teaching english at a spanish school in the area. we´ll be teaching in one hour increments to grades 4 through 9. when we went to visit there, the kids literally surrounded us. they were so excited to meet us because there are no americans in jucuapa except the hawks. yeah. we get lots of looks when we go outside. in the afternoons and evenings we are going to be assisting with learning english using the rosetta stone program. all of this starts next week, so i´m going to start getting very busy soon.
as for prayer requests, well, like i wrote in my title, i am getting bitten up like mad. i´m using bug spray, and i don´t really know what else to do. it´s just irritating to be itchy. also, we´ve been having problems with the computers that we are using for rosetta stone. i spent five hours working on it on wednesday, and i couldn´t figure out what the problem was. when we finally called tech, i found out that the problem was not me, but that the computer didn´t have enough memory. yeah. i was a little frustrated. but this program is a really big deal because it serves as a great outreach to the community. lots of people are interested in it, and the church wants to use it to teach english as well as to get people learning more about God. the work team tomorrow is bringing more RAM, but i´m not sure it will be enough. so please pray that the computers will work. also, please pray for erica, keri, and i as we head into the schools on monday. when we first started talking about it as we toured the schools, i felt completely overwhelmed. i almost started crying. but as i was internally freaking out, i realized that i honestly can do nothing on my own anyways. i am insufficient, and i need to trust that He will be my sufficiency. the other prayer request i would have is for communication. i am trying very hard to speak spanish when i can, but i have trouble understanding people and communicating with them. this is scary to think about as i go into teaching others english. i did realize the other day as i was journalling that this is largely because i am afraid of failure or afraid of how i will look. realizing that helped me to understand that i need to be humble enough to ask people to repeat or make sure that i understand what is going on. it´s just frustrating because i have studied spanish for so long and still feel like i don´t know what is happening sometimes. a final prayer request that i have is just for patience and skill as i do some basic graphic design stuff. i know what i am doing to a certain extent, but i´m definitely not very gifted at it, and i want to do well. okay. i´m almost done.
the last thing i want to say is completely random. the rodriguez family and the girls and i watched the world cup game last night, and i was reminded of why i don´t watch sports. i was so irritated. the referee was calling things that didn´t need to be called and some of the soccer players were acting like children. the game ended tied simply because one player refused to get off of the field after being given a red card. yeah. my host family was pretty frustrated too.
i think that´s it for now. i don´t know when i will update next, but kudos to you if you got through all of this. i love you all!