one more, written on tuesday Sept 12th

So, marietta, our helper (my empleada), arrives every weekday at about 8.45 am, and leaves around 4 pm. our house isn't really big enough to require that much cleaning time, and the only things to get ironed are Steve's shirts, but here is why she comes every day:

1. some guys ring the bell - they want to know where we got our guard house because they need one.
2. the fish delivery guy (who can also get almost anything else that might fall off the back of a truck around here) comes by to tell us that he can't deliver anything this week because of the meeting of heads of non-aligned states - no one can ride around (even on bicycles) with parcels.
3. the water guy from the embassy comes with two more water bottles for us.
4. a couple of guys in a horse cart show up to take the coconuts off of the trees in the back so that they don't fall down on our heads and kill us while we are lazing aroud the pool. I paid them too much, but they had to fend off thousands of ants while 30 feet up in the air swining around machetes. What's a few dollars to me?
5. two guys from the embassy come over to check out the new stove we have in the garage and to figure out how they will wire it.
6. two more guys from the embassy show up to look at the work that the carpenter did yesterday with the new curtain rods, and to consult on the wiring of the new stove.
7. a friend comes over for coffee
8. the garbage removal guy comes from the embassy to take away our non-recycleables.
9. the fumigator stops by to spray the yard for mosquitoes so that we can avoid catching dengue (big problem here for the past few months).

And all of this at my gate before noon today.

In between arrivals and departures, I made orange juice. We bought a HUGE bag of oranges for $5, but they need to be dealt with fairly quickly. No preservatives, you know. I am about halfway through the bag right now, and we have a lovely container of very tart fresh-squeezed orange juice in the fridge.

The only person who DIDN'T come to my door was my Spanish teacher, but that is no great surprise, as driving this week is quite bad, what with all of the non-aligned heads of states zipping around town in official vehicles having meetings. Or whatever you do when you are unaligned. Whatever that means.