Dear Friends,

We are on our way home.  A brief stop in Tocoa (with a terrible keyboard on the computer--worse than usual, even).

Before we left home, we had met a new neighbor family.  They have lived about a 20 min. walk from us for just over a year.  I had heard of them, but thought they lived further away.

On Wednesday, they just showed up and we all had a very friendly chat.  On Friday, we went to visit them.  We started talking about planting and about fertilizer.  Well, one thing led to another and the next thing we knew we had made an agreement for him to carry 6 big sacks of cow manure from Mateo's corral to our place the next day.

And he did!  We are very excited.  Our agricultural efforts had come to a standstill for lack of organic fertilizer.  Most of the potential mulch and compost got burned up in our fire!!

Jose, the neighbor man, is also interested in putting in a few days work with and for us.  I am very hopeful that he'll be able to do that.

We are now down to less than 10 gallons of water in the water tank.  We have been carrying water up from the stream every time we went there to bathe and do laundry.  The stream is lower, but still keeps flowing.

Now is the time for the rain to start. We are ready.  And we are likely to get quite a lot of rain soon.  Her name is Alma.  She's in the newspaper headlines, but we weren't able to buy a paper, so don't know the details.  We may get wet walking home today.

In spite of Prairie being a little sick with a virus, we managed to get most everything done that we wanted to in the city.  We never get it all, so we are quite satisfied.

One of our city projects was buying blouse fabric.  We are now two postulants.  After a slightly more than one year clearness process, we decided on suitable blouses for postulants and novices.  Since some of our blouses are falling apart, this was none too soon.  We also bought a new belt for the treadle sewing machine.  Fabric is not of much use if we can't sew it up.

Another item was a huge papaya.  We shared it with our friends at El Pino and harvested seeds.  We are thinking that the spot that used to have a lime tree might be good for papayas. And now we have manure, so our optimism on planting is high.

More news, or at least sort of news.  Our attourney thinks that some progress has been made and that we will actually get our residency during our lifetime.  It's all about having realistic goals.

Hope to talk with you again next month.

Be well,

beth