My friend Rob, my former roommate from massachusetts is visiting now.  it is fun to have that connection between my new life and old life.  it is funny how you don´t even realize how your life is so different till you someone come comment on all the ways it is.  he brought a fresh supply of dark chocolate and peppermint tea and encouraging letters from home.  it is really empowering to know that i have a community behind me in my mission here. i hope that more will be able to come down in the future; there is alot of work to be done.  thank you kingdom of beverly!

good week of hard work.  we have a new employee, jay, who is hard of hearing.  he has deformed ears, and talks like someone who is deaf.  it is hard enough to understand spanish in general let alone spanish from someone with a speaking disability.  i barely understand anything he says all day but we have a good time.  he is a really earnest worker though, it has been a blessing.  it is great the comraderie that develops when working hard with someone.  so even though we don´t really communicate verbally so much, we communicate in deed, which is better anyway.  we put in a 10 hour day on monday digging/building terraces in my neighbors yard.  it is very satisfying work because you know that it will improve life for people for decades, maybe even generations.  there were so many rocks in the dirt that we were able to build a stone retaining wall on the first terrace so far.  it is amazing, the rock is almost exactly the same as granite from cape ann  (massachusetts).  it is the same type of rock I am familiar working with at my landscaping job back home, so I felt a little nastolgic thinking about my wonderful former coworkers and all the granite we wrestled with in yesteryear.

yesterday i had an opportunity to give a few tours of our garden.  while I was showing our neighbor sharon our tropical spìnach patch, the dog came and what looked like sat down right on the spinach between us.  the dog then kind of still sitting slid down across a few spinach plants wiping her butt on the ground.  sharon, a nurse, says they do that when they have worms because the worms crawl out of the dogs butt and it itches, so the dog scratch it across the ground or across our spinach.  all that to say, make sure you wash your garden greens before you eat them.

A lot has happened the past two weeks.  I haven´t made it to town since my last entry thus i have not had access to internet.  but here we go as best i can remember:

 About two weeks ago on sunday i went on a wonderful hike in the forest up the mountain by our house.  I went back to a tree that i have a vision of building a tree house in.  last time i went there i was unable to climb it, but i did climb a smaller tree next to it.  this time i climbed up to the very top of the smaller tree, maybe about 40 feet high, being so thin, if you lean back and forth, it has a good sway at the top.  i was able to sway it about 6 feet over to the the bottom limb of the bigger tree (whose trunk is about 4 foot diameter).  I cast a rope around the bigger tree and tied the smaller to it, so that i may step off the top branch of the smaller to the bottom of the bigger.  the problem was,  there was a giant nest of termites in the bottom crotch of the big tree, through which the rope was thrown, so while i struggled to tie it off and ascend the bigger tree, i was swarmed by flying termintes, getting in my hair and face.  they don´t sting though, yes!  so negotiating vines, different races of ants, and giant orchids, i reached the top of the big tree, probably about 100 or 120 feet high.  the highest i have ever climbed in a tree.  i rested in the saddle of the top branchs for a break from the exhausiting climb and viewed the mountainous rainforest from above.  i was well above most trees.  unfortunately my ecstacy didn´t last long as i was swarmed by more bugs, bugs of all sorts.  i was hoping that that high there wouldn´t be bugs.  oh well.  the branches at the top make on okay formation for a tree house but not ideal, so im a little bummed about that, im not sure what i am going to do yet.  at least i don´t have to worry about too many humans getting up there.  I climbed down and hiked up a creek, where there were much fewer bugs, and found a nice waterfall for a refreshing swim.

 Larry and Allison would be out of town this week hosting a work team from Minnisota that was working up in La Muralla on the latrine project.  so i had the week to myself back at campus in Las Mangas.

 the next day monday, was good.  Duani, the alledged theif, came to work.  and we had a wonderful day of work.  we did some erosion control work with green barriers, and did some mulchbeds with bamboo leaves.  then we started working on a little prayer room/orchid house that we are making out of the porch of larry´s old house that was destroyed by hurricane mitch in 1998.  i was looking forward to another day of work with the the apparently rehabilitating Duani.

The next morning, I found the screen ripped in the window of the kitchen, but it didn´t seem like anything was stolen.  a couple things were moved around, but nothing was gone.  it was so strange.  Duani did not show up to work.  confused i went on with my day, till i came across our little storage closet door ripped open below our library.  things were shuffled around but nothing seemed gone.  then i saw the window to the libray, some glass panes were gone, and sure enough they got in through the window and then ripped open the bolted door to the inner library, where the computers, books and other valuables are kept.  it was the most protected room on campus.  i went in and dvd players were there, and the computer and safe, it seemed that nothing was stolen, how strange.  Larry and Allsion were up in La Muralla, about a 40 minut hike, so i wasn´t sure what to do.  I saw a La Murallan, biking by, so I sent a note with him to give to larry.  I went down to El Naranjo, a nearby village, to try to find Duani.  His mom said that he went to Ceiba that morning.  The nearest police station is a half our drive up the valley.  so i recruited a german envirnmental volunteer from up the road to go with me to translate.  The cops don´t have a vehicle, so i had to drive them back to campus in our truck, so far, a full hour of driving.  they checked it out looked at everything and we didn´t really know what to do next, then larry came home all sweaty.  he looked and promptly realized that they had stolen Allisons laptop, and later we found they had also broken into her apartment and stole her camera.  All this happened while I was asleep!

 so us four went back to El Naranjo, Larry, the two cops and I, to try to find Duani, same thing, we talked to his mom.  she was very sad to see us coming with the police.  Duani has been in trouble before.  so i drove the police back to Yaruca, and the plan was to bring them back that evening, to catch Duani, as he wouldn´t expect them to come back the same day.  so that evening, i drove out again and brought them back and we headed to El Naranjo as it started to get dark.  Larry was back in La Murally, so it was just me and the Police, walking up the path to Duani´s house with the whole villiage watching.  I had no idea what to expect, my heart was pounding. 

we came to duani´s house, and his family was sitting out front.  it was so sad to see his mother´s face.  Duani was in the house.  All, the time, im wondering why i have to be in the middle of this whole arrest situation, all because the cops don´t have a car.  I kinda felt like Judas approaching my coworker with the police. 

we went in and Duani was asleep, or at least acting so.  the Cop pocked him with his club and he slowly sat up.  i shook his hand and said ¨hola Duani¨.  it was so weird.  he was completely complient, but seemed half dead, as they walking him out of the house and down the street, the villiage looking on.  i said ¨Duani, bad things happened last night.¨ we got to the truck, the cops had me drive them back to yaruca to put duani in jail for investigation.  On the way up, we stopped for the cops to talk to some soldiers, and it was just me an duani sitting in the car.  mostly silence.  Don Chombo, one of the La Muralla farmers came to the car to say hi, and he asked what was up.  I told him that we got robbed last night.  He asked if we knew who it was.  all the time Duani in the back seat listening.  I said, we weren´t sure who it was but that we have Duani here for investigation.  Chombo looked back at Duani a little suprised and embrassed and said okay!  adios! 

i dropped them off at the police station and told the cop that we only want justice, nothing more, because sometimes they can be cruel to those in jail. 

Exhaused, I drove back to Las Mangas, now 4 hours of driving that day.  I arrived at home to see Dona Maria, a woman who works for us and who was staying with us that week, with her family, and there was another man, who seemed pretty upset. 

 i got out of the truck and the man started going off about how enough is enough.  demasiado!  he kept saying.  he listed off all the things Duani has stolen from Larry in the past and said that Larry is just letting himslf get stepped on.  enough!  he said, then he pulled out a gun from his belt and said something about Duani that I didn´t understand and pointed the gun at his own head.  He said demasiado! one more time and left. 

 I was pretty shaken up.  i don´t want anyone to get shot.  Dona Maria said that he is the one that protects us, and protects las Mangas.  I guess, a few years ago, some men came in a car for a revenge shooting, and they went to the wrong house, and they went to this man´s house, and as they opened fire, kids coincidentally had come running out.  they shot into the group of kids, one of dona Marias children died, and this man´s daughter lost her arm. 

besides all the chaos, our neighbor Sharon, had left a freshly baked loaf of bread on the Pila, right before I got home, it was wonderful.  I slept little that night. 

the next day there was a tremendous wind, and being depressed and exhaused, i did little work  in the morning.  Eventually I started working things out in my soul and was able to get to work, making a terrace in the Garden.  The winds continued to pick up, the atmoshphere had something fierce in store for us.  as it got dark the storm hit.  we hadn´t gotten good rain in about two months, an increadible drought, but now it was raining hard.  on the tin roof it sounded like a static channel on tv with the volume on full blast on a sweet sound system.  it was too lound to talk, you had to yell. 

all night thunder tore through the sky and lightning flashed and the wind howled.  It was so windy in my room that in the middle of the night, it blew the blanket right off my bed onto the floor.  it rained for a good two days.  I was scared. 

 I felt like so much pent up tension was released.  I know the plants loved it. 

Days passed and I heard nothing of Duani, until i found out that he had been released by the police.  he actually came to work tuesday morning, and we had a talk with him.  he was mad at us for taking the police to him.  he said they beat him up and poured water on him at night to get him to confess, but he never did.  He said he didn´t want to work for larry but the only reason he was was because he owed him money.  so larry said then don´t work for me, work for someone else and pay me back. 

i tried to explain to him that whether or not he did the crime, everyone in the community thinks he did, and that they want to kill him.  it was for his good that we pursued legal action instead of what else may have happened.  we told him that if anything else happpens, it doesn´t matter who does it, the village will think it is him, and he will be in great danger.  so it would be to his benifit to do everything in his power to make sure that we do not get robbed again.

 Other than that whole fiasco, things have been going well.  I have been doing some terrace work for my neighbors, chris and sharon.  I work in their yard, and they give me fresh baked bread in exchange.  it is well worth it.  We also finished up planiting the surinam cherry trees, now that the drought has broken.  things are starting to get back on pace.  i am off my giardia antibiotics now too.  and today we are buying a juicer to try to start a little freshsqueezed orange juice business with the orphans we take care off, to raise money for them.  and i look forward to rob gifford coming in two weeks!