School (again) and wildlife stories

Absolutely crazy morning. I guess I was feeling sleepy anyway and should be happy for this turn of events, but still it is disappointing. I showed up to my computer class with the people from my house this morning at 10 only to find that the government did not pay the electricity, phone or water bills for any school in the country. So all the services have been cut off. Thank goodness regular classes have not yet begun, but for any extra things like summer study sessions, watering the plants and trees as well as computer classes like mine, things are difficult.

Just makes you appreciate a public school system that functions.

In other news, I should talk about my recent craziness. Normally I would hide this from the blog and pretend that I am only a stellar volunteer, but the truth is I’ve gone a bit crazy, and certain associates have encouraged me to share it with you as evidence of what service in the third world can do to a person.

I’ve had some recent brushes with the wilderness that remind me just how far I am from being comfortable on a couch in suburban Indiana.

I went running with my neighbor Neil the other day where we normally run, way out in the bush where there are fewer people and cars and the air is (usually) fresher. Only about 400 meters into the run, right in the middle of farmer’s fields which are almost ready for harvest, we see an enormous truck emptying none other than tanks full of sewage and human waste onto the ground. Needless to say, the smell was terrible and neil and I kind of freaked out about the health implications—just the other day I sat around with my whole family eating beans practically fresh off the vine. Really scary thoughts.

It gets better (or worse). The rains have really dredged up a lot of insects, meaning that I chase roaches and geckos and crickets out of my room nightly. I guess I didn’t do so well a few nights ago because I woke up feeling really congested—I thought I might be getting sick until I blew my nose and found, guess what, a spider. Miracles of the human body—at least this means that I didn’t ingest it.

Which is better than I can say for the fish eyes the following evening for dinner. (and I forgot to tell you that my last meal before leaving for the states happened to be sheep’s head. Normally when we eat sheep’s head I don’t even know it because all the meat has been pulled off the bones ahead of time. But this time, for some reason, the cook left all the parts in, including jaw bones filled with teeth. My one mom even took the jaw, cracked it in half and pulled the tongue out from inside and tried to feed it to my cat. Scary when even the cat won’t look at it twice.)

One more wildlife story-- we have our cows tied up outside the house these days (there is one that just had a baby which is sooo cute!) While I was walking to the boutique on the corner my first mom started yelling at everyone to grab the baby cow. He was eating a big plastic bag—so we all kind of danced around trying to get the bag out of his mouth, but he took refuge under his mom and then the mom started charging at people. She was tied to a tree, so we all got out in the end, but it would have been terrible to be gored by a cow’s horn in front of my very own house. And the silly baby cow ate the whole plastic bag and choked and coughed for a while.