Besides working on being a housewife to myself, I generally do a lot of visiting.  My closest neighbor is extremely generous with her electrical current, letting me charge my computer and cellphone and put my extreme perishables in the fridge (most veggies, I’m finding out, can be stored for many days without refrigeration).  She has a six-month old daughter who is just so cute, and who has started to recognize me.  She likes to squeeze my finger, so I guess it’s good she’s not afraid of me.  When I leave here (confirmed I’ll be leaving April 2010, by the way) she’ll be almost two years old, what an interesting thought!  All the women here in town are about the same age, and so are the children.  I don’t know of any child over 12!  I like visiting houses, I’m getting good at the visit, sit and chat, known as “pasear” –to pass by.  Another friend likes to use me for my technical skills (this is how you plug in a DVD player, this is how to re-set it to color when the kids have messed with it and it’s in black and white)--not something I mind in the least.  I leave houses feeling happy, and usually not empty-handed.  It’s a common thing for me to be asked if I have enough bananas (never!), plantains or whatever else they might have enough to share.  What a beautiful thing, since it’s never forced.  Right now, people are mostly not engaged in agricultural activities, save a few very notable examples.  Since it’s turning into dry season, most people (whom I know, because I haven’t met many of the farming men, which definitely skews my point of view of activities) aren’t planting any more.  The corn and rice are growing, so they’ll be weeded a few times, and eventually harvested.  I hope I get invited to help out…being out in the fields with the blazing sun is not necessarily fun work in itself, but getting to share the experience and learn things through fairly easy conversation is something I value and find very fun.  My host family is of course still doing things, but even so, the work is less.  The goat (not Ding, but her mother) is pregnant as of November (she didn’t go into heat this month), which means that around April there will be a baby to give to another community (part of the Ministry of Agriculture’s agreement to give the family a goat) and…milk!  Which means cheese and yogurt!  Another family I’m growing close to has “habichuelas” – green beans, more or less, that they’ve been harvesting and selling.  I am supposed to go there and demand beans when I want them, but still I find it hard to ask for things.  This family works so hard, and !BONUS! has grapefruit trees (and lots of other fruits…it’s just that it's about to be grapefruit season).  I like them because they have sort of the same philosophy I do about farming.  Work hard, don’t get stuck doing things the same way all the time, enjoy the fruits of your labor.  I hope to take the mother of this family with me to a Peace Corps community leadership training in January…to involve more members of the community than just my host mom (this woman’s technically my host great-aunt and also my host dad's sister…like I said before, the whole community is a big family or two) in the experience of having a Peace Corps volunteer.  I think it will be good to shift the focus away from my host mom a bit, since there is a little bit of jealousy in the community, that she always gets the help from the Ministry of Agriculture, she got the Peace Corps volunteer, etc.; these good things happen to her because she is willing to seek help and thinks outside the box…which everyone in the community could do, if they wanted.  Still, to demonstrate the point that there can be more of a balance of good things that come the way of the town, I will be hoping to take some other people to Peace Corps trainings.