Heidi says she doesn’t think anything very eventful has happened since the last time we wrote on this blog. I think she is trying to forget the fact that she had a birthday and that she turned another year older. We celebrated Heidi’s birthday at the beginning of the week by going out to dinner as a family, then coming back home for cake and ice cream.
We had parent-teacher conferences for the boys on Friday morning. All of the boys seem to be doing fine (we weren’t sure what kind of report we were going to get from the teachers this time). The boys didn’t have school that day, so Heidi took Grant and Luke and a friend to the water park right by the mall next to our house. The water park isn’t huge, but it has 4 or 5 water slides, a lazy river, and a big swimming pool – good enough for a couple of hours worth of fun (definitely worth the $2.50 entrance fee). Nash spent the day and then the night at a friend’s house.
Over the last week we have noticed a bunch of workers at a big vacant lot (probably 2 lots) just around the corner from us. They were working all week digging up the lot, clearing paths, and making mounds of dirt. We figured out later in the week that they were making bike paths and jumps in this empty lot (we’re not sure who owns the lots or who hired the workers to make the bike track). Anyway, Saturday morning (and then again Saturday afternoon) I took the boys there to ride around the bike paths and to try riding over some of the jumps. They were pretty cautious at first, and luckily nobody was hurt too badly on any of the spills they took.
Luke has discovered a new fruit here, the rambutan. He learned about it at school so when Heidi and I were at the grocery store, we picked some up. There are all sorts of exotic and strange fruits here. We have tried several of them, and some of them are pretty good (one of them, the durian fruit, smells awful. It smells so strong that hotels forbid their guests bringing them into the hotel. The smell is so bad that we avoid grocery stores that carry the durian fruit. Locals love it, though. They say it tastes great). Luke’s favorite, the rambutan, has a red spiky outer covering. Inside is the fruit that tastes basically like a grape (not as juicy, not as sweet, and a little more substance to it), but there is a white pit.
We have been worried about dengue fever recently, because we have heard about 3 or 4 cases of it in children in the last few months. I don’t know too much about it, except that if you get it, it is very painful and can be very deadly if not treated soon enough. The only way to get dengue fever (that I know of) is from a mosquito bite, and it is more common to get dengue fever in the rainy season. Well, a couple of weeks ago our driver, Cartim, told us that his nephew had it. Apparently the boy was in the hospital and very sick for several days. He ended up getting treatment for it and has now fully recovered, but I know they were very worried about him for a while. A week later when I asked Cartim about his nephew, he told me that the boy was fine and out of the hospital, and that the hospital bill was about $500 (I’m sure that was for a stay of a week or more, including all of the medicine and treatments). Cartim also told me that his brother (the boy’s father) had to go back to their village to sell a cow in order to pay the hospital bill. Apparently Cartim also has 2 or 3 cows back in his village, and his father takes care of the cows for him.
That's about it for us. Everything seems to be going well. Hopefully we'll have more interesting things to write about later.
