Village Life, Day Three

I didn't puke today. Nor did I have diarrhea. This is a vast improvement over yesterday, during which I learned how to have diarrhea while squatting over a latrine hole, and how to scrape straw over my vomit when I couldn't make it to the latrine.

Yesterday was awful. I was spewing out both ends all day. It doesn't help that I had to walk past at least a dozen people to get to the latrine, so the fact that I was sick was embarrassingly public knowledge. Oh, well, I'm sure the public barfing on the straw outside my hut helped, too. Ew. Doug and I got sick off little frozen juice baggies that we bought at the market in the nearby city of Farafenni on Sunday. Oh, goodness, it was bad. I was 100% ready to go home, even though we'd only been here 2 days. But I felt soooo much better when I woke up this morning; what a relief to eat food and have it stay down! The simple pleasures of life. I think we'll stay here about 1 more week, and then return to the urban area when our rental house repairs are complete. We'd planned to stay here in the village for 1 month, but I think we'll be ready to go next week.

Life here seems like endless work, especially for the women. Carrying water home from the pump, pounding millet for meals, scrubbing laundry in buckets, feeding all of the farm animals, caring for the children... these women are always working, always doing something, never resting, as far as I can tell. Everything is hard here. No light switches, no dishwashers, no washing machines, no faucets, no clean floors, no toilets...you get the point.

People and animals live together here. I just took a break from writing to help Doug shoo a frog out of our hut. On our first night here, the three of us removed an entire menagerie from our hut: two chickens (I stepped on one by accident!), a baby chick, several frogs, a dozen spiders, and a cat. I woke up with a start the next morning when one of the chickens snuck back in and jumped on my bed right in front my my face! Smaller animals like sheep and goats aren't fenced in, for the most part. Instead, they wander around outside (and sometimes inside!) freely. There's a space for larger animals toward the back of the compound, and we walk through their space to get to the latrine. So when I need to poo, I parade past the sheep, goats , cows, and horses, stepping nimbly over their turds on the way to make my own. It's one big happy, smelly, poopy comingling.

It feels so hard to get clean here. We take bucket baths in a fenced-in dirt area in the "backyard" of Rose's hut. (Doug and I are staying in another hut that doesn't have its own yard/shower area.) No matter how much I clean my feet during my shower, the water from my bathing always splashes mud back onto my feet and calves, so they never feel fully clean. We don't have a lot of surfaces here, either: no tables or shelves, so chopping vegetables and washing dishes both take a lot of coordination. (The floors inside are packed dirt; the ground outside is also dirt. Where, then, should I put my "clean" dishes?) Doug & I have our stuff in little piles on the floor and bed of our hut. Rose is lucky: her hut has two nails in the wall, so she can hang up a few things.

We're having an adventure, that's for sure!

I'll sign off now, since I'm trying to make my cell phone battery last as long as it can out here. Hugs all around!