Au Village

I know it's been a while since I wrote an entry; it's not that I don't have Internet access, it's just when I do, I don't know where to begin. A few people have been asking about some details so I'll try to describe things as best as I can (and I'm sure you are aware by now I am a terrible writer, so things might be a little random).

My house is a triplex; I live on one end, the principle of the high school lives in the center and my landlord with his many children lives on the opposite end. It is made out of cement bricks with a tin roof and we each have a little front porch. There is one window in each of my two rooms and until recently (I just painted the front room) it resembled a prison cell. My shower is a cement box located behind my house along with my latrine. I don't have electricity so around 7:00 each night I light my lantern and/or use my head lamp to finish making dinner or open a book to read. I spend most of my time reading.

My water is bought to me by a women who is expecting a baby and pretty soon. She carries the basin filled with water from the pump (the village's only source of clean water, yet I still have to filter and boil it before I drink it or else I'll get sick) to my house where she tilts her head just so and pours the water into a large garbage can in my front room without spilling it over the edges. She usually comes with her son who is about 3 or4, shy, and a little scared of me; he waits for her by the mango tree in front of my house, he won't come any closer.

My house does not resemble those of my neighbors. Very few homes have front porches, latrines, decent sized windows, etc. A home the size of mine might have a family of 8 or more. Children share 2-3 to a bed (if they have a bed) and 4-6 to a room, they might share a room with their parents (so if one family member is sick with a cold, they all have a cold). Some are made out of mud brinks and few have thatch roofs. The shower boxes are scattered throughout the village and only come up to the person's shoulders, so you can see who's showering if you were to be walking around.

Walking around you would also see the women at work. Carrying water from the pump or well, hand washing laundry (the basin is set on the ground and the women bend at the hip resting one arm on a knee as they scrub the clothes while their strong backs are kept straight- I also wash my clothes this way, however not as gracefully), preparing meals, selling vegetables they brought back from the fields, or working as a tallier with their sewing machines set outside. The women most likely have a baby strapped to their backs (I get nervous when I do this, but the baby's really don't go anywhere) or a toddler alongside them, or both.

On Fridays, the women set up booths at the market. This is where you buy your food, house accessories, fabric to make clothes, etc. Prices are not fixed, so you have to bargain (I am not good at bargaining and usually end up paying a higher price). You can even buy american style clothes which look like they came from the 80s and were once donated to the salvation army. The women in village usually wear a t-shirt of this style with a pagne (translated to loin cloth), faded from years of use, wrapped around their waste. If they are travelling or want to look nice for a celebration, they will either wear a boomba or a model (I'll try to get pictures). Men wear western clothing or the traditional boombas. The more imporant the man the more elaborate his boomba.

The food here consists of starch, starch and more starch served with a thin tomato sauce. Vegetables are hard to come by. There is la pate (pronounced pot) made from corn meal and has the consistency of jello, you eat it with your fingers and dip it into a tomato sauce that is most likely spicy from hot peppers. Yam pile is pounded yams, it reminds me of a thick mash potato. It is also eaten with your fingers and dipped into a sauce, sometimes it is a peanut sauce. (Yam pile with peanut sauce is my favorite here.) You also have your rice serve with beans, I eat rice here with a spoon, but again a lot of people use their fingers. Meat here is tough and hard to chew, and the whole animal is eaten. Just the other day my neighbor's kids were dividing up pieces of a rat, it wasn't skinned, looked like charcoal, and they even ate most of the bones including the head. I'm glad they didn't offer it to me, somethings I'm willing to try (like goat and bushrat which are not so bad), but other things I'm not. They also eat snakes here. (Speaking of snakes I saw a green tree snake that was scared out of it's tree, killed and burned and a cobra. I didn't see the cobra until my homologue reacted by grabbing my arm to pull me away. His response was anti-venom is very expensive.)

Well, that's the highlights of my village. I'll try to write again sooner than later.