en una semana

I'll do a fun story before the no-fun story...

Yesterday I experienced my first Dominican "jira" at the river. Natan and I drove up to Las Guasaras with his brother, cousin, and a few friends to cook some chivo (goat) and rice. The river is still pretty cold, but I at least got half-way in...it was a fun day full of food, music, laughter, and observing the many Dominicans cooking their own food over a fire, playing dominos, and drinking lots of Brugal and Presidente. Here's the goat we cooked...

-

Here's Natan and I - happy to get our minds off lots of stress for the day...

And here's me and the boys...Elias (Natan's brother), me :), Ciao, Gibran (Natan's cousin), and in front, Hegan.

I had a really nice weekend after a pretty tough week...which leads me to the no-fun story: in a week from today, I will be back in Michigan for surgery. My health this semester still hasn't been great and after a few months of different doctors, different medications, an endoscopy, blood tests, and an ultrasound, they found that I have gastritis and gallstones - maybe caused from Dengue and losing so much weight so fast, but they don't know for sure. So, after praying about it and talking to many people, I decided do the surgery in the States. They have to remove my gall bladder, which I guess is a routine laproscopic surgery, but I definitely feel more comfortable doing it there, and then will have my parents to take care of me after the operation (recovery time is about 2 weeks). So, I don't know how long I'll be there, I'm hoping just 3 weeks - one week is Spring Break for us, so I'd then just be missing 2 weeks of school. Please pray for me, I'm not excited but I do know it's necessary and will help me to feel better again.

-

I will keep you updated and hope to hear from you soon!