Los perros ladran

I´ve been here 2 weeks!  We have basically been slogging along with training, which includes Spanish classes, sessions on things like health and safety, and technical sessions with the business group.  I can feel my Spanish getting better, which has been really encouraging – I guess that’s what 4 hours of Spanish class a day does to you.

We did our first business project this week, traveling to a nearby town (the one that’s walking distance from where I live) to visit small businesses.  We split into 4 groups, but there are only 3 advanced Spanish speakers in the business project, and my group was the only one without a near-fluent speaker.  It was scary at first, but wound up being a great opportunity.  We went to a leather store, and because we didn’t have a native speaker to fall back on, we were forced to really put ourselves out there to interview the woman.  It went really well, and turns out, the man who owns the business is my next door neighbor.  Small world.

As I mentioned before, my “town” is very small, basically just a road going up a hill, and the houses are all close together.  The very first house has a pool table, and we have gone down there a couple times with my host dad’s dad (Don Paco).  It is really fun, but the family has 5 dogs, 2 of which are huge, and they bark the entire time we are playing.

The dogs at that house are only the beginning.  Our street is dog central – I can’t even estimate how many there are… maybe 30?  You literally cannot walk anywhere without setting off a chorus of barking.  There’s the sad emaciated dog near the pulperia, our buddy Guardian (who follows us wherever we go), the two dogs that barrel down their driveway and crash into the fence, the dog with the opposable thumbs, the two dogs that wail from the roof of their house, and the great dane that’s caged perilously close to the road.  Once I get through the dog assault and get back to my house, Fiona starts jumping at my feet, biting either my shoes or my pant leg, to the point where I can barely walk.

I never thought dogs could play such a role in daily life, but the barking that is so constant it’s like white noise.  There’s also one rooster and a herd of really cute small chickens (not chicks, but not full grown either), and my host family has 3 cats that like to jump on the roof, so there’s a nice chorus of animal noise at all times.  I kind of like it, except when they wake me up in the night.  Also, I have no idea how someone with a dog allergy would survive in Peace Corps.