el fin de la semana!!!

It has been a looooong week. Every single day this week I had to leave my community to either go to San Vicente or San Salvador. The weekend is here and I am happy I will sleep in tomorrow. At least I will try. There is a 7th Day Adventist church that is basically in my backyard, and every saturday they spend the entire day from dawn til dusk singing praise to the lord on a speaker system with the volume all the way up. That’s how they do it here. Every time amplifiers are involved- they make them go to 11. I went to several dances for the fiestas patronales, and the music was so loud that my ears would ring for the next 24 hours or so. The dances were fun though! The last one was a “discoteca” that included a latino boy band performance. It was incredible what a great set up and show they put on with fancy staging and lighting and everything. The fiestas lasted for almost 2 weeks.... and I am glad they are over so that things will calm down here some. All day and all night people were setting up fireworks that sounded a lot like gunshots... I would wake up in the night startled but the sound. And people would be out there playing live music at 5 am too.... It’s so different here! In the US I would consider filing noise complaints if my neighbors were constantly loud and partying at night. No such thing here of course. I have it pretty good at my house though as far as noise goes. My friend Jessica has a rooster that lives right outside her room that crows at all hours. Apparently everynight she lies there thinking about how she can kill the bastard. She sounds pretty serious about it too. It is so loud she says earplugs don’t do a thing. But we signed up for this. :) i’m not having any problems really. It does suck that the one guy we had in our training group in our community is being moved to another. He got home from the dance the other night to his family being involved in a violent altercation with a fellow. It was decided that the home was unfit for a volunteer to live in... So he’s gone and it’s just me and the girls now. We will miss him. I’ll write more tomorrow about what i’ve been up to this week and my experiences with my first trips to the capital. It’s bed time!!!