October 22, 2007
Went home for lunch and whipped out the 5,000 sketch. It's a bit of a reversal, from what I've been doing. I woke up this morning and looked at a Tarahumara cup on the far wall of our bedroom. I didn't have my glasses on. I went with that.

Anyway, our server has been acting up all day (Meghan left to work at home) and it won't load scans from the server onto the blog. I'll try again later.

Meanwhile:

Bye Bye Ms. Peru Piggy Pie
"So I woke up a few days ago to the screaming of what turned out to be a pig. My host mom said in her heavy Quechua accent, ]van a matar chancho'. So I jumped up on the rock wall that seperates our house from my host dad's son's house and saw that they had the beast on the ground and were tying its legs. They all laughed when they saw me on the wall. 'Tomas quiere mirar'. The next part gets a little heavy for the weak at heart. Using a razorblade, they cut a whole in her backside and pulled out her eggs. They then took a steak to her heart with a hammer and through the screaming she slowly died.

"The reason they killed the pig was to celebrate the completion of putting on the roof on the newly built parts of the health post. The idea being that people from the town show up to help the contracted workers and when its finished there's a celebration and food. Well I showed up thursday at 8:30 to work and I was the only one from the town that came. A couple of guys showed up two hours before we finished and some ladies came to serve chicha but that was it. I worked my ass off all day with these guys. I was in charge of throwing buckets of water into the cement mixer. The pig afterward was delicious."
—Tomas Bell

"If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven't done anything yet."
—Lou Holtz