For all the times I thought my job sucked...

Last week my school had a bike riding excursion to the neighborhood where Andres, the guide from my school and a graduate of the boys program it sponsors, grew up. El Pantanal is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Granada. The families make a living collecting scrap metal from the city dump. You can see the dump outside of the neighborhood by following the cloud of smoke from all the rotting going on. The parents and children search through the garbage in the blazing sun in order to get five cents for every pound of metal they collect. I asked Andres if he preferred the metal collecting or leading us around in the afternoons. He´s still thinking it over.

We rode through the neighborhood on bikes that the school has fixed up. I had one that very well could have been the same bike I had in third grade. It was kind of notstalgic until I got tired and forgot about pedalling backwards to stop. I had to do a panic stop by dragging my feet, but at least it woke me up. In the neighborhood, we left our bikes in the house of Andres´ family and hiked up to a nice lookout over the city. On the hike, we stopped to look at a yard where they had a pet pisote on a leash. Since pisotes are one of my favorites (the raccon monkey pig animals I fell in love with in Guatemala), I asked if I could pet it and the woman at home was nice enough to pick him up and bring him over to me. His name is Sylvester and when he was picked up and cradled he stuck out his little tounge. Pretty much the cutest thing ever!

Visiting El Pantanal was another great reminder of how incredibly lucky we are to have all that we do living in the developed world. It´s also humbling to remember that these are the conditions in which the majority of the world lives. Makes me feel really wimpy for having whined about all the times the water goes out in my homestay, not too mention all the times I take for granted the incredible luxuries I have back home.