We got on a bus and drove 6 hours east to a little town called Petauke. We pulled up and saw tents set up all around, and of course, it made me giddy!
This is what our bathroom looked liked...
yep...
you squat...
and avoid the bees that are swarming...
(and at night the bats)
it really made me appreciate my toilet.
Did I mention the smell??
This was our shower. We get our water from the well, up the bucket, and there you go!
Showering at night under the stars is a pretty amazing thing...
At the well...
So, out in the small village we would go do the same DFA's that we did in the city...to get a different perspective. We would all pile into the back of a truck to travel into the town. I LOVED that part.
and we also had interesting things to eat while at bush camp...
This is a reallllly large locust i found on the ground. Don't worry, I really didn't eat it.
Okay, sitting around the campfire at night just talking...or laying down on the ground and looking at the Milky Way...or sitting down with 2 blind men in their 80's and just sharing stories...it was all just so great.
But then...
We got to go live with an African family for 3 days.
Meet my house.
very very awesome. fun fact: found 4 baby rats in my bed that didn't even have their eyes open. That night, the mama rat came and was running around the top of our mosquito net looking for her babies. Yeah...
Here's the yard. This is the dove house, the goat house, and the chicken house in the background.
We basically lived at a zoo. Goats, doves, chickens, roosters, goats, pigs, cows, and all had babies.
part of our job was washing the dishes everyday.
So, one day we went out into the fields with them. It was 4 km walk away. We sat down in the fields and pulled off dried ground nuts and sorted them to be taken back to town.
This is Daisy, the wife of the house. And those are all the peanuts we gathered and sorted.
And we also would help get all of our water from the well.
Plus, to have access into a village, you need to talk to the chief or the headman. We had a headwomen in our village, so we had to greet her when we arrived and make an official goodbye. She gave us sugar cane as goodbye gifts. They were sooo huge!
We also learned how to wrap our heads with the traditional fabric.
oh, and this is how we showered. We took a bucket, and a cup, and went behind this wall. There was no door and it opened up into a field. The cows and goats stampeded one night while I was standing there naked in the shower, and I thought for sure the wall was coming down!
Pretty funny story...Cara and Heather when to the use the squatty potty one night but were a little freaked out as I was walking up. Come to find out, there was a bat in the toilet that kept flying out at them. We were scared that when we peed on it, it would fly out and hit our butts, so we were trying to throw rocks down there to make it fly away. We ended up just running out of the bathroom screaming several times and just peeing in the grass. :)
So that was my time in the village. It was so great and I didn't want to leave. I was just totally in my element, you know?
After this, we got on a bus and headed to a resort 7 hours away to debrief for 3 days...
