December 5th

it's saturday afternoon, alex and I have been in the village for over three weeks at this point and it occurred to me this morning that I haven't written any letters since we arrived in the village. So much for my goal of writing letters every week, huh? alex is currently putting together a recipe book, we've been eating pretty alright. They eat a lot of taro here, we like to grate it, add onions, garlic and egg and fry up little patties, olsem (olsem is a bislama word you could use for 'such as' or 'like' or 'all same') potato pancakes; we like to do veggie stir-frys with soy sauce and local jinja (the ginger here is pretty fantastic), we've also grown fond of a banana cake recipe that is just bananas, coconut milk, smol (a little bit of) flour and one egg. alex baked some brownies the other day, which were pretty good (especially considering we only had about half of the ingredients) and were planning to try our luck with a sour dough bread sometime next week, wish us luck.

We adopted a cat yesterday, from some Australians that were working at the local school (They were here for 6 months, but went home last week, I think some more volunteers will becoming after the new year, it's a gap year volunteer program, for kids taking a year between high school and university, their main focus is helping the kids with english) The cat's name is 'Lady Gaga', it was named by the kids at the school. Alex wants to change the cat's name, but I don't think it's nice to change people's names. We put her inside a pillow case to carry her up the hill to our house and then we bribed her to be our friend with a can of tuna (with fulap sugar mixed in), then she shit in our bed. Alex and I are trying to convince ourselves it wasn't personal. she sleeps a lot, has going out exploring and come back (which we see as a good sign the bribe worked).

We went for a wokabot today to check out our antap garden, one pumpkin plant and one basil plant seem to be surviving alright, still waiting for the seeds to come up and for someone from the village to show us how they plant sweet potatoes in these parts.

The cement floor of our future house is finished, so next friday they are going to start putting the walls on the house. I think the roof and floor are the slowest parts, so were hoping the house starts coming together pretty quickly now. Alex's papa predicts three more work days until the house is finished...they average one workday per week, so only three more weeks until our house is possibly finished, P
Pretty exciting.

peace corps is pretty fun.