Purple thread.
When my friend asked if I could fix the uneven hem on her dress so she could wear it to her son’s graduation, I quickly agreed. That’s a fifteen minute task, tops. She didn’t have any purple thread, so I said I’d take it home with me. When I got home I didn’t have any either, so I went to the closest tailor to buy some thread. He was closed, so I walked to another, also closed. I checked with a couple of friends, one said she never has thread in her house because her husband may ask her to mend something. The other said she only keeps black and white, keeps things simple. I went up to the cloth store at the market that seems to have everything you’d ever need sewing related. No purple thread. I told my friend and she must had used some of her many connections and found some purple thread, finally. Seems like every time we are in Guatemala, there is always something that is difficult to find. On our first trip it was pillows, on our second trip it was tampons (excuse the frankness), this trip, purple thread. Who knew.
Paul is in Canada, so I will likely include details of our day which may not be so amusing. He, along with the grandparents, like to have more detail, not less. Feel free to skim and skip, as if you don’t already…
Took me a while to fix the messed up hem of the dress since it was a stretchy t-shirt material. I miss my sewing machine. That’s another thing I would make good use of here. I could make the most amazing pillows out of typica. There is a market every Thursday where you can buy used clothes, the beautiful embroidered indigenous kind. Then you can create amazing pillows, wall-hangings, bags, tops. I saw a sewing machine for sale in El Salvador for $100, should have bought it.
But since I don’t have a machine yet, I tried to find a tailor who could alter Madi’s new swimsuit. To no avail. I did find the son of a tailor asleep on the sewing table, curled around the sewing machine. I startled him when I asked where his dad was. He said he would be back tomorrow. I ended up fixing Madi’s swimsuit by hand. It took me over an hour. I just hope the whole thing holds together when it’s wet and has the pressure of a body inside it. Yikes! It’s amazing the stuff you’ll take on down here just because you have no choice. I’m putting swimsuit alterations under that category. I also fixed a toilet today, also in that same category.
Fixing things for the first time reminds me of the time when Paul decided to replace one of those showerheads that generate hot water, popularly called “widowmakers”. I told him maybe we should get someone in to do that and he said, “You just have to hook up the electrical part and the water part and hope you haven’t crossing them somehow. How hard can it be?” Needless to say we let him take the first post-installation shower.
After school, Madi went out with two of her friends to shop for graduation dresses. They aren’t graduating, just attending the school graduation. Then the girls made calzones with meat, cheese, broccoli. Madi would never eat such a thing, so she brought it home for us to eat–delicious. Kier brought my favorite street food home, so I didn’t need to cook. The girls don’t have any homework tonight because they are going to the waterpark tomorrow with their school. They leave at 5 am and come back late the following day.
We had a little bit of rain, just enough to keep everything green, and keeps the dust down on the roads. I do believe the rainy season is upon us.
Cali’s frog blog: Today at school someone by mistake got playdoh in my hair. At least it wasn’t paint this time. We made playdoh animals for the kindergarteners. I made a snake, lion, and a tiger. I got one hundred percent on my English test, but that’s no surprise. If I can’t get one hundred percent then the test is wrong. My favorite class is comunicasion y linguaje. In that class we get to learn about different places and hear interesting stories. Today at recess we played that we had a circus on the monkey bars. My friends taught me how to sing this really cool song in Spanish called, “fiesta, fiesta, luma luma, guy.” My favorite thing to do with my friends is make perfume. You need a lot of different containers and you put water in it. Then you choose different flowers from the yard which smell really good to you, you break or fold the petals, then put them in the water, leave them in the sun for a while, and in a couple of hours you have perfume. My tuk driver is very very funny. He pretends to leave us at school then we yell, “Hey, tuk tuk, tuk tuk!” and he comes back. He is always smiling and playing jokes on us. P.S. Love you all!