Na ma skar! My first two weeks of home-stay are over, and it has been hard, fun, terrible, and amazing! So many different feelings all at once. I have been in a village with no electricity and a water pump. That means no sinks, no refrigerators, and no fans! The people go to bed around 11:00 and wake up at 4:30 in the morning! That’s when the sun rises, but that’s not very much sleep! I was allowed to sleep longer, so by the time I woke up I was served morning tea and breakfast. My favorite breakfast was the rice pudding or the spicy ramen noodles. Then I took a bucket shower, in the bathroom which is the picture to your right. Its also where everyone goes #1, so that was different. The women shower with the door open, wearing a petticoat up around them, but they let me close the door. I would put all my dirty clothes in a bucket to wash after the shower. We used laundry detergent and washed by hand, using good ol’ elbow grease. Afterward we would hand all the laundry up in the yard. This was kind of embarrassing, and it took me a few days to actually comply. After this I would rest, because it was quite hot and muggy. Then would come lunch – rice, some sort of veggie boiled 
with an orange spice on it, and meat. I still haven’t gotten past the visitor’s stage, so I had meat at every meal. We eat with our hands, only the right one, and they rinse with water before eating. Luckily I had brought hand sanitizer with me. They don’t use soap much, only to wash their clothes and sometimes when they shower. For everything else, they just rinse with water. After lunch I would usually go on a walk if it was cool enough, and hang out with the neighbor kids: cycling, shooting a bamboo gun, playing badmintonor cricket, or going over vocabulary words. Dinner was served at 9 or 9:30, so we had a long time to wait! We talked a lot about stars! I always love the evenings, because it is much cooler without the sun, so everything seems more fun. We would go on evening walks, to get some more exercise and visit with the neighbors. By “we” I mean my house Ma and the neighbor girls. We would walk up to the creek and sit and watch for fish, and talk to whoever came by.
This picture is of me in a little boat. We took a trip to a lake nearby the village. We got to go for a ride in the boat all around the lake, and Rema, the girl with me was picking little fruits out of the lake to eat. I ate one and they were pretty good, but I wasn’t sure they were quite safe to eat, so I didn’t eat very many. 
I’m learning a the language slowly, the culture seems to be coming at me a lot more than the language – there are so many things I don’t understand about guests, and men and women! I have a lot more to learn, but Dad keeps bringing friends into my life to make the learning so much more fun! Keep yarping that I have endurance in the heat, and patience in learning culture and language.
