Chad: yeah so this is going to have three parts, but i wanted to share them all.

story #1: our friends mike and aileen are here now (they have a blog too and when they teach me how i'll put a link to their blog spot onto ours) . we took them out friday night. we had been to a restaurant that rocks that we wanted to bring them to. our typical means of travel is that i drive and emily stares at our santa cruz map and tells me when to turn. it's not foolproof but it's pretty bolivianesque. at any rate we were using our not quite tried and true method to get to the restaurant. we got a little turned around and we needed to get back to a street we had just turned off of. so i took the initiative and took the first available right to get to the main street again. now i have to be honest, i have rarely gotten nervous or uncomfortable when driving here, but there is a first for everything. i turned onto this multi-lane street to face no less than a hundred headlights coming in formation right toward us. evidently i chose to turn onto a busy one-way street the wrong way right after their light had changed. yeah, i was pretty much nervous. i believe that there was some screaming. i know there was honking from furious bolivian drivers going the correct direction. i gunned the engine and cranked the wheel. we flew up onto a sidewalk and over a corner to land safely on the street we had turned from. poor mike and aileen, for them it was like night #2 in bolivia. bienvenido a bolivia (welcome to bolivia).

story #2 i worked really hard the other day digging a trench and installing a drainage pipe at an orphanage. it was hot.

story #3 i caught a huge beetle this morning and it was cool. that's all. (so maybe one story and three cool pictures)