Happy Thanksgiving (Nov. 23, 2001) Well, to update our last email, as soon as we moved to San Luis, the rain began.  It has rained almost every day for two weeks, and was so foggy, we could barely enjoy the view over the pretty valley below our house. Still, school is going well and we´re happy with how much some of the children have learned.  We´re a little frustrated because many of them won´t be able to go on to high school (too expensive for their families.) We´re enjoying living with the family very much -- they´re generous and patient with our poor Spanish. The family lives off the land, growing potatoes and onions, and raising cows, pigs, chickens and guinea pigs (a delicacy here!  Ever seen a skinned guinea pig with an apple in its mouth?  That´s how they´re sold in the supermarkets here.  No, we haven´t tried it...) We´ve learned so much about this lifestyle, particularly when the family tried very hard to save a sick baby bull (they had bought it for thirty dollars.)  We tried to help, by feeding it water since it didn´t want to eat anything.  Sadly, it died and ended up on our dinner plates a couple days later (Sorry, Jillian and other veggies!!) As for those hot springs we mentioned, we walked hours to get there and back... and they turned out to be barely luke warm!!  They were bubbling thermal pools, but probably all the recent rain turned the water cool.  So, with blisters on our feet, and without the promised hot bath, we returned to our little house just as it was getting dark. We hope to make up for that little misadventure this weekend, when we will visit the town of Baños a couple hours south of Quito.  This is supposed to be a beautiful but touristy place, with real hot springs. We will see...  At any rate, it will be nice to have a couple days on our own -- a mini-vacation after three weeks of working with the children. We also just got news of our placement in Samoa.  It turns out it will be a Habitat for Humanity project (building houses for the poor.)  We are happy about this, since we´ve both worked with Habitat before and feel it is worthwhile.  We still hope to live with a host family there, so we can learn about the Samoan way of life.