FELIZ NAVIDAD!

Hola!

Just wanted to send a quick note wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! We have a big day planned here in the Sanchez household. Lots of cooking and eating! Tonight we open gifts and then have supper at midnight. I think tomorrow is a pretty relaxed day so I am making breakfast for my family! We'll see how it turns out. Anyways, I wish you the happiest Christmas! I am leaving next Monday for La Paz with my host sister and 2 other Salters. We are then traveling for a week and heading over to Lake Titicaca. Apparently it's beautiful! I'm excited! 

Much love everyone!

Feliz Navidad!

Adrienne 

The Countdown till Christmas!

Hello everyone!

I am sitting in a very hot room fanning myself because it literally feels like it's about 40 degrees. This past week has been blazing hot!! It's almost too much to handle! I haven't updated in a while, so here's another.. 

Things are going really well here. I am trying to remember what has all happened in the past two weeks or so. Well for one thing, tomorrow is the last day of painting the new place for the kids. I am amazed at how much work we got finished in the past two weeks. Presently, I am very thankful to have one more day of painting left. There are no kids around these days, which makes me sad, but I am excited to have a bit of a break and spend time with my host family etc. 

 Well I had a great weekend... Kristen (the other SALTer living in Santiago- about 12 hours away) came in for our MCC Christmas party this past friday. We all had the day off and I went over to Laurie's place to help her make lunch for all of us. After we had lunch we went over to MCC and we had a christmas party with all the workers from MCC. We had some games to play and then had a great meal together.  

This past Saturday was cookie baking day!!!! It was such a great day. All of us SALTers got together in the morning and went over to a shopping market and got ingredients to make 4 different kinds of christmas cookies. We definetly went overboard on spending money on these cookies. Every member participating was supposed to triple their cookie batch so we could have a cookie bake exchange. So we started cooking around 11:30 and I make "Jack frost Mint Chocolate Surprise cookies"... I named them that because I put huge chunks of mint and chocolate in each one and so if you can one it was always a surprise to see what you got inside. haha I thought it was pretty clever. I made a total of 113 cookies to exchange. I don't think I've ever made that many cookies before. Now each salter made about this amount so we had over 400 cookies made.  So I came home having this huge try of exchanged cookies to bring to my host family. They LOVED them. I seriously brought home about 50 different kinds of christmas cookies in total. What a day! 

This past Sunday is Walter's 60th birthday! A big milestone. Mary had the whole kitchen cleaned out and people from church came and painted it and the ceiling... and it was all for his birthday. here birthdays are pretty extreme. So we had a big party in our backyard. It consisted of eating and more eating! 

This weekend we are heading out to the country... now Walter wants to leave at 5 in the morning- I'm still confused as to why so early. But I will just tag along and make it seem like I know what is going on! I've gotten quite good at that! Sunday should be another choir practice- I'm doubtful if many people will show up! And then next week I will start helping out in the Children's homes at Stansberry. I am looking forward to being with kids again! 

The countdown to Christmas has started! I can't believe that it is already next week! It doesn't even seem like Christmas. There is definitely a lack of snow here!  

I hope this update finds you all well! 

Much love!

December is here..

Wow. It´s December 5th. What a LONG week! I have been meaning to post something earlier with some pictures but the computers here are so slow. I will try again when I get the chance. Things are very hot here! Today it´s a scortching 40 degrees... it´s almost too much to handle. So these past few weeks have been busy and lonely! Last weekend my family and I drove 2 hours out into the country to a wedding. We got there and of course we were the first to arrive. The worst is not really knowing when the wedding really starts, it mostly depends on when they ¨feel¨like starting! The wedding was very interesting. It was a couple of our church that got married. Anyways, so we had to leave early because we had to head back to be at my host parents grandson´s (Lucas) kinder graduation. And WOW is all I can say! This graduation was hilarious and way over done. They take Kinder (kindergarden) graduations SO seriously here. There were about 100 people there, all dressed up, and sitting at tables with food. Then they called up each of the kids and they all had gowns and hats on!!! So then they all got certificates and then afterwards they showed an hour long clip of each graduate from when they were born until present. It was a long night! My host parents loved it though! Then we went to Talita Cumi (where Lucas´s parents work) and they had a big fiesta. So by this time it was about 11:30. For some reason we drove there and talked to people for about 5 minutes and then decided to just go home. I am never too sure what my host dad is thinking all the time. I´m hoping I´ll understand soon. So that was a long day.

Sunday afternoon was my first choir practice. Oh boy! So six out of the 14 people showed up. So I did the practice anyways and I must say we NEED practice. For some reason here the tendancy is to sing really out of tune...

The kids at the Guaderia are on summer holidays so this past week all of us (the profies) starting sanding and painting the new place in Stansberry that will be the extension to the program I am working in. It was a LONG week of hard labor. I was able to get my hand checked again at the hospital... there is seriosuly something wrong with my skin. I won´t go into details but it is apparently from the sun so they gave me a creme but it is definetly not working.

This next week is more or less the same... just cleaning and painting. This next friday is our MCC Christmas party. I´m really looking forward to that! It´s wierd to be away from family and friends during the holiday season.

I hope you are all well and I´ll update again.
Much love.