Letter, June 14, 1977

Dad, Mom & all,

I hope all’s well up in the north country. In the last few days we’ve been getting a short break in the rains, it clouds up in the afternoons, but only a few drops fall. <Sofia’s Dad planted some corn in the little lot by his house about May 1st and it looks like it’s almost ready to tassel.>

It sounds like Mom is really getting heavy into the gardening & landscaping this year. I always liked the yellow raspberries we used to pick across the road before urban expansion wiped them out! The blueberries will be nice to have near the house too. I haven’t found a name for blueberries in Spanish yet. <I guess Sofia will have to wait ‘til she gets to Wisconsin to find out what they are.>

<Sofia and I kicked the intestinal parasites, and things are going very well for us.> She’s been doing very well in the university, and her scholarship has been renewed, meaning she won’t have to pay any tuition. Also, she’s been talking with her professors and they’ve promised to give her summaries of her course work last year, which will help her get credit for her courses here if she studies in the U.S. She has a month of vacation starting June 24th.

Pilar and Jaime Olson are in Wisconsin now. Pilar’s brother says they just got word recently that they had arrived up in Neenah. I guess they had no hassles in El Salvador.

I’m becoming an expert bean cooker! These days I spend two days a week cooking beans all day at work! (It’s for the bean storage experiment we’re doing.) It has it’s rewards though, I take cooked beans home and we only have to add salt, onion & a few other things, & warm them up.

Carl Reed (the other Peace Corps guy where I work) made baked beans one day, so the Costaricans could try them. He made them with a lot of brown sugar, and they didn’t go over real big! They were good, but because they were sweet, you couldn’t eat very many before you got sick of the taste. If you think of it Mom, could you send me your recipe for baked beans? I’d like to try it with the beans here. Also, I could use a good basic white bread recipe. I made a “no-knead” bread from my beginner’s cookbook, & it wasn’t too bad, but I’d like to try regular bread & all I have is a recipe for whole wheat.

That’s about all I can think of. I hope the crops continue to do well there. Let me know if Belle has a heifer. It would be nice since the old girl isn’t going to be limping around too much longer!

Take care,

<Dean & Sofia>