boas festas

Normally I like to sit down and think about what I am going to write before writing it, but today I am going to be spontaneous. We spontaneously decided to come to the city in the hopes that the correios would be open and that some mail/packages had arrived. Spontaneity often leads to overlooking certain important details, like the fact that the correios would be closed on Saturday. Fortunately, the internet is open. Hopefully there are no important details for me to overlook in the writing of this entry.

Life here has been a whirlwind of eventfulness that I never would have expected in this quiet little town. As the trimester wound down, I found myself yearning for the day it would end. Despite what I would call a success for my first experience teaching, it was definitely time for a mental vacation. I think I was on autopilot for the last week or so, but I survived, as did all of my students (though some ended the term on the negative end of the grading spectrum). The long awaited farias has come, and is passing much more quickly than I could have expected. In the days leading up to the break I held visions of waking up early for a run, relaxing with a book and enjoying the delicious two weeks of freedom. It wasn´t until we wrote a day-to-day schedule of activities that we realized that we only had two delicious days of freedom, the rest had been chewed and swallowed whole by meetings, visits, weddings, church (yes, that´s right... I go to church here, but you would too if it were the only community meeting place), parties and Peace Corps.

The biggest moment of farias was the surprise visit to Chã das Calderias, the village in the volcano. Blinded by the fear of another endless meeting, we set off to encounter the boss of bosses in the education world of Fogo only to visit a surprise festa and make our way up to the crater. The surprise of it was numbing, and what brought us back was the intoxicating magic of the quiet, still air and the never ending flow of wine and music pouring into the streets from the local mercado. Fortunately, we have a friend there and were able to stay and enjoy it all for one precious evening. We hiked the volcanzinho (the comparitively small peak of the 1995 erruption), felt the heat of sulfer air pouring out of the vents and returned to the village to enjoy the nightly festivities.

As much as I would like to include everything that has happened in the past 6 months here, I think that would be impossible. I feel like through the past 4 months at site I have experienced almost everything that there is to experience. We have witnessed birth, death, marriage, birthdays (from a 1 year old to a 99 year old), illness, disease, the killing of a pig (I cried and have now been dubbed "she-who-runs-from-dead-pig" by my ever sympathetic colleague, "he-who-is-a-pain-in-my-ass"), crops of plenty reduced to dry, brown land, the beginning and end of a trimester at school, a lonely Thanksgiving, an eventfilled Christmas (there has been a party every day since school ended and I don´t think they are finished until well into the new year...) and everything in between. Now I find myself waiting for the arrival of the new year. With all of this newfound experience, I can only hope that I will be able to start this new year, 2007, with a better understanding of my community, clear objectives and the promise of a year of change. As 2006 comes to a close, I can almost feel things coming together and falling into place.

Anyways, perhaps that is just the relentless optimism that burns inside of me speaking, but I hope not. As a good friend and quasi-hippie/quasi-mother recently said... keep the faith baby! I want to wish you all a peaceful, happy and prosperous new year. I would say "see you next year," but I probably will not see you next year. In that case, see you in 2008.