22nd October

Hello everybody,

Well, our 3 months in Zumbahua are drawing to a close very quickly- just a week and a half left, and on 1st November we head south. It"s been quite an experience but we both feel about ready to leave

This weekend we went back to Angamarca- Chiara, a nurse who works in Angamarca, and her boyfriend Lauro had invited us to stay in a cabin that one of her patients had offered to her, free of charge. It was an amazing location, perched on a hill overlooking the valley, built out of wood and filled to oveflowing with saddles, lassoos, spurred boots etc (basically it looked like the setting for a wild west film), and not just for show- on the second day the owner turned up to pick up half of the equipment, including llama-wool leg-warmers that looked like something Abba would wear. It was fun, except for the fact that you could see through some of the cracks in the walls, meaning that at night it was freezing!!

Anyway, that"s about all the news I can muster up, as my teaching and building day-jobs are much the same as always. The house we"re building at the moment is half an hour from the nearest road and that means carrying everything there by hand- including the lovely bags of cement that weight 50 kg each (roughly 7 stone!). The family that lives there gets by on the grandmother"s (tiny) pension- the number of sheep and pigs a family has here tells you how rich or poor they are, and this family has none at all. Mauro and I both decided that we wanted to give them something that should help them long-term, so on market day we went with her to buy a couple of sheep- a ram and a ewe, so hopefully after a few years they"ll have a respectable flock!!

We both miss everybody very much, write to us!

Ross

Just to add that I tried on the lama wool leg warmers and tried to dance and I really felt the brown haired girl of the Abbas! :)))) Adelexxx