Hey y’all,
My first week living in the amazon jungle looks a little bit like this.
It’s freaking hot
To get anywhere my team and I travel by boat. Boat rides are by far one of our favorite parts of the day because we can finally catch a breeze and get away from all the pesky mosquitoes.
Bucket~showers have now grown on me and it happens to be the best way to cool off besides the boat rides. In order to take a shower, we have to lean out of a window beside the toilets and throw a small bucket with a small rope attached to it and throw It into a large water tank that gets filled by rain water. It takes about 3 of the small buckets to fill up the larger bucket which you shower with. Oh, did I mention there isn’t any electricity… well we have electricity but it only works from 6pm~9pm which only leaves us with a few outlets to charge phones and computers. In our house, we only have two lights which doesn’t leave much light to shower with if you shower at night. Our headlamps have been very useful here.
When you lay in bed, you sweat.
When you wake up, you sweat.
When you eat, you sweat.
When you do ministry, you sweat.
We really sweat.
Tarantulas, we have lots of tarantulas. We named one of them Marcel.
Marcel climbs all over the walls and beams in our room which can be quite frightening when you and some of your teammates get up enough courage to get up close to take a good look at her when all of a sudden, its 9pm and the power goes out right as you and your friends are next to her. Talk about panic!
I’ve learned that the best time to workout is at 5:30am because it cool and no one is awake yet. I leave our house and walk across the field into another large room and get my run in for the day.
One night at dinner, we heard the sound of a bat and later saw it. Sometimes when you look really close at a bat they like to fly at you, then all over the room. As all the girls begin to scream and holler one of the guys, that lives there, came in with a broom and slapped it down and killed it, then he casually walked out like it was no big deal. Oh, speaking of killing things, we killed Marcel last night. She plopped down from the roof and started to crawl around. At the point, we all agreed she needed to be gone so Aly killed her with a broom.
The team and I went on a walk (hike) thought the jungle about a day ago which was freaking dope. We swung from vines like Tarzan and ate 4 different kinds of jungle fruit. I’ve never had such amazing fruit in my life!
Toilets… the toilets we have don’t flush. Have you ever had to fetch a bucket of water to flush your toilet? Well I can now say I have. We use the same bucket and water we use to shower with to flush our toilets. Again, at night it becomes more interesting… when I say interesting I mean scary. You never know what lurks in the darkness of your house when you live in the Amazon Rain forest.
Today is the first day its actually rained. At least once a day there’s a sprinkle, but as of last night around 7pm it’s been pouring, and it continues to be that way. As of right now my team and I are a bunch of soggy gringos sitting in this what appears to be a restaurant, yet they don’t really have anything to eat or drink.
As far as getting Wi-Fi goes, it doesn’t exist here. On December 5th,I’ll be back in the town I stayed in for 3 days and will be able to communicate more.
Feel free to ask me questions, I’d be more than happy to let you in on this cray adventure I’ve begun.
For those of you who worry about me, don’t.
I’m thriving.
I’m sweaty, but thriving.
~Chooch
