today i bought a fourth of a watermelon for 1 dollar and ate it by the beach

hi to everyone,

today we had our first tutoring session! i was with keedia and her mother martha, martha has six kids and keedia is her youngest. we read "caps for sale" in the shade by the beach this afternoon and it was wonderful! keedia did a wonderful job of reading and her mother was very eager to help. some of my counterparts has much more rambunctious kids so i got lucky :) tomorrow we are off on our first weekend excursion to San Ignacio, a town in western Belize with mayan ruins and lots of caving. the plan is to do a caving trip where you hike about an hour to the cave, then hike through a river and eventually swim into the cave - so hopefully that works out! it will be great to see a different part of the country. a great thing about working with schools is that everybody gives us snacks, yesterday we got peach juice and mini coconut pies, and today we had chicken wings, breadsticks and punch.

so far the living accomodations have been good - although i did come in the other afternoon to find that my ziploc full of granola bars had been chewed into by a little visitor. i am telling myself it HAD to be a mouse, and could not possibly have been a rat. i was hoping the biology professor would tell me a gecko was the culprit but his exact words were "small mammal." yuck. anyway, the nature valley bars are now zipped in a different bigger suitcase and haven't been bothered.

i will be gone for the weekend so the next post will be sometime monday i think! but things are going well. and mom - there are TONS of hibiscus plants everywhere! giant bushes of them with red blooms. i am taking pictures of everything so y'all can see what it looks like here. it really is beautiful.

goodnight, hill