Dia de la Independencia

It’s a rainy Monday here in Chihuahua; it’s also the day before Mexican Independence Day and since the kids don’t have school most of them are with relatives. Right now there are about 30 kids here so it is pretty quite and chill right now. This gives me some time to sit and write for a while. I just finished a game of soccer with the kids and man do they love soccer! They are pretty good but more than that they love to talk about how good they are and what skills they have. That, coupled with their vulgarity (Janiene has a hard time catching it), their roughhousing reminds me of my uncles, or at least what my uncles must have been like between 6-16.

Janiene and I keep finding our niche here more every day. The farm life is pretty much the same for now, but shortly they are planning on making some big changes. One of those big changes is getting rid of all the ducks, rabbits, and Cornish hens and increasing the number or chickens. This means getting rid of about 500 animals, mostly Cornish hens (~450) and all their cages. It also means a lot of clean up and removal and installation. On the bright side the nun in charge of the farm said that we might just release the ducks and rabbits on the farm grounds. That would be great because I wouldn’t want to kill the, to quote my friend, “adorable, furry, cute, sweet bunnies.” If you need proof of their cuteness please see the photos, we just put up some new ones of Independence Day celebrations and new animals. Also they want to make the farm, get this, 100% organic, so they can sell products that say so. This means setting up fields for crops and increasing what few ‘crops’ they do have. They are going to use a mineral called zeolite, and with out boring you with the scientific jargon, it is supposed to reduce the soil’s dependency on rainfall and fertilizer. Hope it works. So it seems they will be keeping me busy on that farm for a while.

Our relationships with the kids have also been growing with leaps and bounds. We are more comfortable to jump in on games that they are playing, and sometimes they even seek us out to play with them. They also ask us for help on their homework, mostly English homework. Not all of our time with the kids is great and some of it is pretty testing, and I’m sure some of you parents are saying ‘Well duh!’ But we try to take the good with bad and just really focus on the good. Story time: Last weekend Janiene and I had to put all the little boys to sleep. Sounds easy, right? But as I think Janiene has mentioned we really don’t understand how the consequences work so that’s difficult. Sundays are especially difficult because the kids return from their homes and want to share the stories with their friends and they are running around and goofing off. Finally, and I don’t know how, we got most kids in bed but they were still yapping away so I said if they didn’t quiet down I wouldn’t tell them a bedtime story. This actually worked pretty well, except now I had to come up with a bedtime story. So I did what any self respecting adult would do and told them the story of “The Princess Bride.” It worked, they liked the story line (who doesn’t?) and they went to sleep. I guess that really sums up the dichotomy of my relationship with the children. At times they are the sweetest kids and you feel sorry that this guy from Chicago has to be the one to tell them a bedtime story and at others they drive you mad and you just want to… never mind.

Until next time
Luis