Whoa.
Dude bros, life is LONG.
The past few weeks have been full of all kinds of discoveries and happy things and sad things. Tony and I went to the Isthmus and learned lots of stuff about the communities out there and megaprojects and all that good stuff. I learned how to make my very first pair of jorts. It is hot in Mexico. For Easter we went back to Teotitlan, the Zapotec weaving town that I love, to visit the woman that heads up the Vida Nueva women's weaving cooperative. Ah, co-ops, Easter, sweet families....
This is sort of a bittersweet time: my boss just arrived in OAX from Managua, which is a wonderful thing, but Dunya will be leaving soon, and Lalo and Alexis soon thereafter. It's weird when your already tenuous support net starts to dissipate, but it's also kind of whatever--at this point, the unknown is just sort of the unknown: not bad, not good. And that's kind of exciting.
It looks like the team will be moving to an adorable neighborhood just north of the centro at the end of the month, Xochimilco, and you are all of course welcome to housewarmering. Of course, before that, we will have our site visit with tha Boss, a goodbye trip for Dunya to Puerto Escondido (hello, Brazilian bikini store!), and then a long trip to Mexico City, Puebla, and Tlaxcala for Tony, Betty, and me. I'm particularly excited about this, because I haven't been to Tlaxcala in six years but the town we are going to out there is one of my favorite places ever ever. After that, we'll have a couple of days of rest and then Tony and I will be back off to the Isthmus to do more planning for the North Carolina delegation (wanna come?). Then the move. This is all on top of the everyday work that has to get done. It's a crazy time.
I don't know when I'll see my family and I miss them like crazy. I also have about 4 layers of homesickness operating: Colombia homesickness, Appalachia homesickness, Carrboro homesickness, and the one that tends to prevail all and thus feels most gentle, Northeast homesickness. At the same time, I walk around Oaxaca in a sort of grateful daze: I'm not a tourist! I get to live here! I know all the nicest places to sit!
Oh! I've managed to find a few new nice places to sit (rooftops) and also what might be my favorite bar. Also the other night we all went out and danced really hard (I always dance hard, but I dance harder to Shakira, it's the truth) and then we came home and Lalo and I stayed up being philosophical and nostalgic and eating cold potato wedges out of a plastic bag and I'll be damned if it gets a whole lot better than cold potatoes, BFFs, Shakira, and whiskey.
Today was a grueling workday and the past few days have all been sort of grueling because I am pretty sure I have parasites again. I am taking the stuff and taking it all in stride, but even today we managed to take sometime in between all our work crap to buy sweet cowboy shirts and get hell market haircuts (this time 10 pesos for mine!). I have been laughing a lot remembering my mother and my aunt Rocio's antics. Gosh, I miss them. I started laughing at the memory of them laughing really hard at something during a haircut today and I had to make myself think of sad things so that I could stop laughing so hard while someone had scissors right next to my face. I then reflected out loud about how glad I am to have had my heart broken, that I will always have something to help me get serious again when I am laughing too hard.
