We are starting to get into a wee bit of a rhythm, though most of us know once you get into any form of rhythm something will come along to knock you out of it, but so far so good.
Anyway, we start our days about 8:30am. Andy gets up and goes into the kitchen where he boils water for tea and oatmeal. Over breakfast he reads one of the books in his current rotation--either Harry Potter en Espanol (though he's almost done with it), the King James Study Bible, or Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. While he does this, I make the bed and then do my physical therapy stretches and exercises on top of it. They take me about fifteen minutes. By the time I'm done, Andy's finished breakfast and he comes back to the bed (I told you it was also our living room) to continue reading, and I go into the kitchen to make myself breakfast. Really, we've been practicing this each morning and it's pretty seamless by now. Dirty dishes can cramp up the timing a bit, but we're learning how to incorporate them.
Then we have all morning to study Spanish, read our new homepage on the internet-- the BBC news in Spanish on Latin America, clean the apartment (the amount of concrete dust that comes in through the windows is remarkable, as is the amount of hair that falls off my head without me noticing), and eventually make lunch.
We usually leave for the orphanage about 1:45pm. It takes no less than 50 minutes to get there--a 35 minute bus ride and a 15 minute walk (if we're cruising). Andy refers to those 15 minutes as "the worst 15 minutes of our day." The bus drops off us, and we cross four lanes of highway traffic to get to a little walkway alongside a larger highway, what we think is the Pan-American Highway. On that highway, we cling to the left side of the road and brace ourselves. What are we bracing ourselves for? Well, let's set the scene. You're about to walk in the emergency lane opposing traffic on a major highway. Think back to the driving etiquette I described in my second post. Sometimes, for the heck of it, cars or buses or motorcycles or trucks decide they'd prefer to drive in the emergency lane (even when there is zero traffic on the actual road). They also routinely emit disgusting amounts of fumes. It's been good, "How long can I hold my breath?" practice. Worse still, is that it's like you're walking through a dump. Despite the $400 fine for littering (clearly not enforced at all), there is trash EVERYWHERE. And it smells like trash often does. Yet, the stench aside, there is broken glass with every step, which blows up at you when vehicles pass you and if you're not wearing pants (hey, hey, as in I wore a skirt once), you kick it up against your legs when you walk. In addition to that, the ubiquitous dust found in this country attacks your eyes.
Now that we've set the scene, let's walk through that for a mile. But wait, because of the aforementioned driving practices, it's not so safe to walk in the emergency lane, though I often do because our alternative is a choppy, dusty, narrow beaten foot-path on which one can encounter heaps of trash, the actual broken glass bottles, piles of dirt that require circumnavigating, etc. When we're hustling, it takes us a solid 15 minutes to walk this stretch. Thus, I figure we're doing about 4 mph, though probably covering just short of a mile since walking on a treadmill (my point of reference although I admit it's been a long time) the pace is more consistent because it doesn't quite have the same obstacles the highway does.
Phew. I am exhausted just describing it and knowing that three hours from now it will again become my reality. No but really, I'm not kidding. I'll have to continue with our daily pattern later.
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