as you can see above, i’ve added a shameless plug to go vote for my picture of the monkey in the t-mobile camera phone contest. the link and shameless plug will be a permanent fixture on this page until the voting ends on june 2. if my picture wins, i get a 5-day trip with 5 of my friends on a private jet. i want to win so badly. so please follow the link above, and score all the pictures as a 1 (“yawn”) except for the monkey. you should give the monkey a score of 5 (“wow”). i’m currently wobbling between 1st and 3rd place, so go vote! go vote now! go vote often and a lot! thanks. 
anyway. that’s the big excitement in my life at the moment.
my phone rang last night at about 10:00, and i was surprised to see the caller id showing a 404 number…my sister!! it was an unexpected call, but it was great to talk to katie. see, she’s spending 9 weeks (from last weekend until mid-july) working with faith ministries in reynosa, mexico. they do a lot of work building houses and giving medical attention to the extremely poor people living in the colonias, which are basically these huge shanty-towns outside of the city. when i say “house,” i actually mean “one room concrete-block, concrete roof building” on a small lot that shares water with the neighboring lots on a street that alternates between dust and mud depending on how much it’s rained. so you get the idea. very poor living conditions, worse than you’d find almost anywhere in the u.s. i spent a week down there last summer, and katie’s been there three times, and decided to go back as a full-time summer volunteer this year.
my mom had talked to katie on sunday, and as is to be expected, once she arrived in reynosa nothing was what she had been told it would be. mexico, flexico, as was the mantra last summer, meaning that to be there, you have to remember to just be flexible. of course, the idea of flexico is easy to follow when we’re sitting here in air conditioning in the comfort of the u.s., but it’s harder to remember sometimes when you’re down there. so katie’s first few days were rough, especially because she’d been told she’d be living one place (and isn’t), and that there’d be two other volunteers there (there aren’t, and won’t be until june 9).
but lucky for her, it’s a border town and if she stands on the roof of the church, her cell phone can pick up a signal from mcallen, texas. and she can call her friends and family.
she said things were getting better. and she knows this will be a good experience. so i guess it’s going ok for her so far.
