I’ve said already that we have moved, and to be honest, it’s gotten easier to pack up every month, but to do it twice is sort of weird and a lot. I feel like I grab at any little thing sometimes to feel at home at a new place… here it’s the open window that I can see the sunset out of in our room. As you already know, we traded our old home for a new one that is deeper into the mountains… We even got to cross one of those thin shaky foot bridges to get across the river and into our village.
There are animals right outside of our room… including chickens, dogs, buffalo, pigs and piglets, goats, and anything else roaming. One of the first things that a Racer wants to know when arriving “home” is most likely the bathroom situation… that’s usually my question anyway. Where’s the toilet and how can I get clean?
Sometimes the options are slim, but knowing what it looks like just helps to understand how much we have to adapt. For example, if a contact points to an open field when you say “toilet?” then you know you aren’t going to have anything to sit on… Here we have yet another squatty, and our shower… well, there is no shower. So where do we bathe? Well… as girls we all go at once to the community water faucet… and we keep our clothes on. This has been interesting, but I’m getting used to it just like everything else.
It is pretty funny though I’m sure to be on the outside looking in… I mean, three white women washing their hair and trying to wash most of their bodies all to the spectacle of a village woman who is waiting to fill her family’s water jar is not something you see every day. It’s scary to think that this won’t be my life soon, but for right now it is…
