Lovely

So I had to switch home-stays and go to a new family, but it has been a really good change. These are a different people group, but they still speak my language (most of the time). This village has electricity! The latrine has a door, and there are babies to play with.The picture is from my bedroom door during the rain. You can see the lovely garden :). The building on the left is the kitchen - all the rooms are built independently of each other. When it rains, I am always told to go to my room, and they do the same. They always seem to get up before the rain stops though, because by the time I emerge they are all busy! They always tell me "la hay la hey", which means slowly slowly, because the mud becomes much muddier. Most of the rooms have mud floors in these types of homes. The rooms I have stayed in have been with concrete, but that's because they give me the best room in the house and I tend to live with the richest family in the village. The shower area is off past the kitchen, and its outside!!! I wear a petticoat pulled up so that it covers everything, but I still find it very awkward. I think they know this though, because they tend to stay away while I'm over there. The pigs give me no such consideration.
The next picture is me sifting out the rocks and bugs (worms!) from the "tan" which is rice when it is still in its shell. It took a lot of convincing for them to let me help with this, and they kept trying to get me to stop, but I stayed for a good hour. The day before this, they had put the tan out in the sun, and would walk around in it to mix it up. I'm still not quite sure what the point of that is, but I got to walk around in it for a while! We also went on a jungle trip through the trees on a dirt path to get drinking water. They use three sources for their water: one for drinking, one for cleaning, and one for "other". We carried large metal jugs to the spring, and after mine was full I couldn't carry it so the 15 year old girl next to me carried it for me! You may think I'm just being silly, but those things weighed probably 80 pounds. They take the water back and boil it then filter it, to be extra safe.
This next picture is all the kids that were at the house when the family discovered I had a camera :) The two older boys are at the house a lot, and the one in the yellow might even live there, but I just can't figure out what they do all day! The girls are very busy with school, housework, and caring for the kids, but the boys just seem to roam around!
It is also hard to figure out family relationships, because everyone is either a brother/sister or aunt/uncle. I really don't know the relations of most people that I meet - even I am a sister and an aunt!
Today there is a "bond" or strike called in the city. Everyone uses this day to stay inside, because they're not supposed to be out driving. The strike is kinda like a warning not to go outside, so me and my roommates are chillin in the house taking the day off! I'll go back to the home-stay tomorrow morning. I'm actually excited to go back. It was really hard to say goodbye to my family for even one day! They are such sweet ladies and little babies, I speant 10 minuites saying goodbye! Leaving this next week will be really hard - but I'm excited to get started on my service project and officially move into the house (and start paying rent) :).