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) :).

Update 2

Na ma skar! Here are some extra highlights from my first two weeks of home-stay. Its been hard, but the people are really awesome and great friends and hosts! There was no electricity in the village, but it was a believing village, so that made things more comfortable!

This is me in a saree, with my neighbor lady and the other neighbor’s son. They’re all related! It took forever to put that thing on – there’s so much fabric! Anyway, the shirts are only half shirts, so I was kind of uncomfortable, but it was really cool! And silky :)

So this is me with dirt on my head! It was a church work day, and they were putting down that dirt floor you see in the pic. All the ladies were doing it like this, and all the men were either digging up the dirt, packing the dirt down, or carrying dirt like the lady behind me. It was super fun!

They blow bubbles with the leaf of a plant! So cool! I wasn’t very good at it…

Haha – the ever-dreaded squattie-pottie! If you will please notice, there is no door.

This is me and Susmita, one awesome girl! She was camera shy, so we compromised J Most of my friends were a lot younger than me, so it was good to have Susmita to help me with a lot of the culture/dress rules. And she was quite sarcastic and a trickster, so we got along fantastically, being like minded and such!

And this what I tried to upload..but it just would not work. This picture below is the same thing only cuter!

Update 1

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.