Wednesday August 3, 2005
I asked Catarina (my host mother) why she thought grandparents were important. At first she told me that her grandparents weren’t important because they were now dead. So I asked her what about the little kids, like Carlos and Manuel (her two small grandchildren)? She said that she was important because she always loves them, siempre amo a los nietos.
Pascuala’s (my host sister-in-law) father and little brothers came over today and sat in her room and then left. Catarina said they came to tell Pascuala that her two brother that had gone to the U.S. had finally called last night at like one o’clock. It had been twenty-two days since they left here and they had only called the week after they left, so Pascuala had been very worried about them. I asked Pascuala where they were and she said that they had made it to Los Angeles. Catarina asked me if it was far from the states, and I told her it was the United States, it was in California, so they had made it there. Pascuala asked me if it was far from Utah and I said it was far, but not too far, not as far as New York. I told them that my husband was born in Los Angeles.
Today it rained really hard. It was one of the hardest thunderstorms that we have had during the day. It used to rain a lot during the night, but not as hard during the day. Lately however we have had no rain. Today it clouded up like it usually did, but then we started to see lightning and then it started raining and soon it was pouring. Catarina came into my room to finish setting up her new weaving project, a panuelo. This week she had been working on a paz, but she finished it today and started on a new project. She has been working really hard lately. She works at night until she goes to sleep because I can hear her pulling on the backstrap loom at night. I guess she has a lot of work to do.
I finished my summary of my project in Spanish. It took me longer than I thought it would. I guess I write pretty slow when I am writing a paper anyways, and this was in Spanish so I had to think about what I wanted to write, then think about how to put it into Spanish, and then look up the words that I didn’t know how to spell. I think I spelt most of them right though. The grammar is not perfect but it is intelligible.I asked Catarina about padrinos and she said her kids do have them, but the only thing they did was present the kid to the Padre when they were baptized. She said that they are from this town, but that is basically the only thing the padrinos are for.
Today we had a lot of visitors. Pascuala’s family came, then a lady looking to buy chickens came by and right after that a guy came over to look at our bulls. It is interesting to see them bargaining with each other because they know each other so they don’t do it really aggressively, but they do bargain. Someone says a price and then someone else says a price and then they comment about something else and then get back to bargaining.
