Another Day, More Dirt

Today we finished our first ¨full¨week of work. We had a couple of short days due to a hold up in the building of the daycare center, but felt pretty good after a productive day today. We were able to lay bricks in a couple of rooms, haul more sand (our favorite activity) and prepare the front area for dirt to be built up and a veranda created. This week was a warm one, sunny and quite windy which stirs up ridiculous amounts of blowing sand, but we´ve grown quite acustomed to sheilding our food at just the right moment.
The schedule of our days has typically been something like this...We catch the bus or rides with host parents at various times of the morning but all gather for breakfast around 8:30 at the daycare. Mondays and Wednesdays we get milk rice and Tuesday and Thursdays we have delicious rolls or fried bread. Several of us discovered that without coffee we have no energy for the morning and have frequented the next door shop for individual packets of instant coffee which truly has saved our lives. We then work at the construction site from about 9:00-10:30 and take a break to eat some fresh mandarins or bananas and a portion of our daily dose of wafer cookies. We pick up work again until noon when we go back to the daycare to receive a large and delicious lunch of soup and a plate full of salad, rice or pasta, and a meat dish. It´s all so good!! We siesta for a little while before we head back to work until around 4:00 when we finish work for the day and eat a snack of bread and hop on our various buses to head home. Some evenings we see no one except our roommates at our host families house and other evenings we gather together with our Bolivian friends to play games and eat more wafer cookies :).
We are all experiencing improvements in our Spanish slowly but surely and enjoying being part of the Bolivian culture. Tomorrow morning we all leave early for a weekend trip to Chiquitania which is about a 5 hour drive to the northeastern part of Bolivia. Yuneth, the director of the daycare and her family will be driving us there and spend the time with us. We will relax out of the city for a few days before coming back to Santa Cruz for the final week here. It´s hard to believe that there is just over one week left!!