June 20

Last night was the farewell dinner for Fabian the Spaniard, finally he will be able to reunite with his wife. Why he decided to get married and plow right into months of a long distance relationship I´ll never know.

It was a tearful goodbye for the family I´m with, and I don´t think it´s quite dawned on the younger kids that he´s gone for good.

Today I arrived at the school to find people out of their offices, looking downcast and muttering and asking questions. Someone had climbed in, or broken in, to the school, broken the computer lab window and carried off all 18 laptops. The police came. The employees split up the internet cafes and went around asking if anyone had been asking about laptop prices. There have been no developments.

I spent most of the day going through receipts of purchases from last month, calculating per pound and per unit costs of everything that the restaurant buys. I then asked the ladies in the kitchen for estimates as to how much of each product they use per plate. (They were very reluctant to start weighing palmfuls of lettuce, so I just wrote down their guesses). Tomorrow I´ll do all the math, and see how much profit we are making from each plate, so we can later decide what sort of sales deal we want to kickoff to boost sales.

I finally finished reading False Economy by Alan Beattie, and am now reading History of Ashes--the ugly story of the CIA since its inception.

I played an hour of basketball with the teachers at the local middle school against their team. One of the little pricks scratched a chunk out of my neck, so I made sure to elbow him in the nose on the next play, it started bleeding and he had to leave. Well not really, but I wanted to. It rained for about half the game, and then I plodded back home in the pouring rain on Fabian´s old bicycle, bouncing along the cobbled streets.

I went straight to the little gym. A couple regulars threw in some Eminem and Coolio and Cypress Hill. I took advantage of a rare opportunity to rap along with the songs without gettting shot glares.

To be continued, hold your breath...