I'm at homestay for training and it's...I guess it's everything I imagined the Peace Corps to be. It's difficult, it's exciting, it's intense, it's exhausting, it's intensely beautiful, it makes my brain hurt and I want to jump up and down and just scream sometimes. And even though it's everything that I expected, every second of it has surprised me. Anticipating something and actually living something are very different, even if your expectations meet the actual experience.
For some strange reason I think the most comforting thing for me right now is the rain. It comes pouring down, sounding like hammers on my tin roof and making little ravines down every dirt path, and I just feel safe. It feels just like a rainstorm at home and I just want to curl up on the couch and smile. It also cools it down significantly, which is so necessary here. I just washed (for the third time today, just like every day) in my wash house an hour ago and I'm laying in bed, under my mosquito net, and sweat is just dripping down me. Very attractive.
I dropped my phone in a bucket of water tonight. So it's currently not working. My last phone mysteriously just stopped working, so that means I may be going on to phone #3 in about 2 1/2 weeks in country. I wonder if that's a record. I did have the record for most broken computers at my last job. 5. I was pretty proud of that. None were my fault (I think) though! Anyway, my phone is currently all taken apart and sitting in a 5 gallon container of rice. Makes sense, it'll suck out the moisture or something like that.
I'll give you a little example of my normal day here. My host mom wakes me up at 6:30. This morning she actually let me wake myself up. Maybe she realized that as an almost-27-year-old woman, I'm very capable of waking myself up. Probably not. She'll probably wake me up tomorrow. So, at 6:30 I immediately head to the scary latrine, because although I do have a shiny new green pee pot, I haven't really used it in my bedroom yet. I haven't quite assimilated that much...yet. So then I head to the wasosu (wash house) for my first bucket bath of the day. After that I go inside for a bun with either just peanut butter on it or peanut butter and cheese. Not as bad as it sounds, I actually quite like it. Then I head over to my language teacher's hut/small wooden shack for 4 hours of language lessons. About half of the days we go out for a koi (a little walk around the village, greeting people) for the 2nd half of our lesson. Then I head back to my place at noon. I wash up for a second time and eat lunch. Then I either have technical training in the afternoon, or I do laundry. That consists of 3 buckets of water and a washboard. I'm going to have some serious forearms by the end of this from all the clothes wringing. Then I try to fill up the rest of the afternoon without going insane with all the teenage girls staring at me. Then wash-up #3 and dinner and family time. I usually hang with my mom and 3 younger brothers and 1 younger sister for a few hours. Then it's "me time" (what I'm doing right now). Night is my favorite time here. Everything settles down a little. There aren't quite as many random kids screaming and running around my house and I get to spend more time with my host-siblings, who I really like.
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