9 Down, 13 To Go

We have managed to locate 9 healthy goats and we are so excited! We still need 13 but those will come soon we hope. We found the 9 on Saturday and some of them are pregnant. When we went back on Monday one of them had had her baby just hours before, so meet the newest member of our project! I left the buckets in the picture for reference so you could see just how small he is but I'm now realizing that we don't have buckets like that in America so you might not be able to realize just how little and cute he is.

The kids out in the camp are so excited about having these goats. Last time I was out there one of them had even camped out in the pen where the goats were going to be kept and he was playing in there like he was playing with goats. These kids are going to be so much more excited when they see all these little bitty baby goats running around...I'm so much more excited now that I've gotten to play with this one!!!

Updates

I recently sent out an update but had several returned that said I had bad email addresses. If you didn't receive an update in the past week and you want to get them please leave a comment with your email address in it and I'll get you added to the list. I won't publish your email address.
Thanks Y'all!!!

Unreasonable??

"Comments from officials are allowed to be published but opinions and other things just cause confusion," he added.

This is a quote from a local head guy over why they're shutting down newspapers who want to print anything related to a rather large and controversial event that happened here a few days ago. What 'other things', like facts? I don't know. Freedom of the press is definitely not a problem we have around here!

The Last Thing I Expected Today

So I went to a paint store with a friend today. We were looking for red paint, just plain red paint. When we walked in there were cameras and lights everywhere. We hesitated, thinking that maybe they were doing something special and weren't open but they told us to come in so we did. While we were looking around this lady approached us and, well, here's how the conversation went.

'Do you want to be on TV?'
'Excuse me?'
'We are making a TV advertisement. We want you to be in it and be our customers'
'...What?'
'We are making a special Ramadan commercial. We think you would be very good actors'
'But we are not dressed nicely, we are not looking pretty.'
'Oh, that is no problem. Of course, you are looking beautiful.'
(we had just spent 2 hours at the steamy outdoor market)
'What do we have to do?'
'Walk in like you are just arriving, look at the samples and pick one, take it to the man and he will mix it, then you will walk out smiling and satisfied with your paint.'
'Oh, well if that's all, then I guess we can...be in your commercial'

The lady leaves to go and tell her cohorts that the white girls said yes and we spend a few minutes laughing and thinking about what our local friends will say when they see us on TV. Then the lady comes back with some bad news...They wouldn't be ready for another one and a half hours. We were already a little iffy about really being in the commercial and that just kind of sealed the deal, we definitely were not waiting around.

That was for sure the most random thing I have experienced in a while and definitely the last thing I expected to happen today.

My favorite thing...

It rained again yesterday only this time it rained during the day. I have to explain that when it rains around here you would think it was a blizzard in the middle of summer in Florida. Everything stops, everyone goes home, it's like the world is coming to an end. It's even one of those things you remember. Sort of like 'remember that one time that it snowed on Thanksgiving in Dallas?'. Anyone in Dallas remembers that day and probably where they were when it happened. Around here it is more like 'remember that one day when it rained during the day?' Ok, so now that we have the picture painted...

Us crazy white folks had a birthday to celebrate and we don't let anything rain on our parade so we headed out into the great unknown. We had to kick it into 4WD and broke the 'never drive through water when you don't know how deep it is rule' but that's only b/c we'd driven on the road a million times and, if we wanted to pull away from our front door we were just gonna have to break the rule.

I'll just tell you my favorite part of the entire day...you probably won't get as much of a kick out of it as I did, but I absolutely love to see these 'oh so modest' women with their heads and everything covered take off their shoes, hike up their skirts to their thighs and trudge through knee deep water. I don't really know why. I think it's some sort of subconscious 'you think that I'm immodest when I show my ankles but look at you now' type of thing. I wish that I'd had my camera. I would post a picture of these 4 ladies standing at the edge of this road in the pouring rain looking horrified at the thought of what they were about to do as if they weren't getting soaked while they were standing there pondering their options. Then one just did it, she just hiked up her skirt and jumped in and the others sort of unwillingly followed...it was really quite hilarious to witness.

I do have to clarify that this is way different from the last post. Those are refugees fleeing famine, war and 'disputable' genocide living in mud houses with no electricity and little food. These are uppity people in town where there are beamers and huge villas.

More rain

It rained again last night. Today we went out to the camp for a meeting and found the entire thing flooded. We needed to walk a few blocks and I was ok with that. It's just mud, right? I mean, this is their life, they walk through this junk every day. Just because I'm white and not a refugee does not make me any better than anyone else and I can experience this part of life just like they do. At least that's what I thought until we got to the corner of this street that was totally flooded. People were walking through it knee deep, well some people (see pic below) and just as I was about to turn the corner this lady came up and stopped me. In perfect English, which was very surprising, she basically refused to let me walk through it. Said that I would get diseases (which is probably true) and that she was NOT going to allow me to do that.

After the random lady's speech forbidding me to walk in the water, I remembered that it kind of stinks being sick and I've done enough of that lately. I don't know that I could handle throwing some weird African skin disease into the mix. Needless to say I changed my mind and the lady called this kid to go and get a donkey cart, so the kid walked through knee deep water to the market and brought back a donkey cart....now that I'm thinking about it, he didn't even ask for money. That was really nice!

For those of you who have never experienced a donkey cart, well, it's an experience to say the least. This was my first time and I made the mistake of telling my friend that. She proceeded to announce to everyone we passed that it was the white girl's first time on donkey cart...Guess I provided the entertainment for the morning.

But it was an adventure to say the least. My feet and pants were covered in mud but I was expecting that so I wore old clothes and my chacos...I sprayed off the chacos with the hose when I got home and tried to disinfect my feet as well as I could but, even though I didn't actually walk through the water, I still wouldn't be surprised if I got some weird African disease...oh well.

Despite my adventure, my heart really goes out to the people who are living out in these camps. They live in mud houses and when it rains their houses fall down. There is no public transportation because the roads are so muddy nothing can get through and they are left to track through mud until it dries. There were quite a few people trying to use the mud from the street to rebuild their mud walls. Everyone else was using buckets to scoop up the water out of their houses.

Village Life Pt.1

Life is tough out in the village in the middle of the desert. There is no electricity, no transportation, little clean water and food is hard to come by. There are no bathrooms, no showers, and education is severely limited…especially for the girls. I spent just a small amount of time out in the bush but what I experienced there was life changing.

Meet Mona. She is 23, has 6 children and is pregnant with her 7th. She was educated to grade 4. When I met Muna I was stunned. I’ve thought about how my life could have be different if I was born somewhere else but I usually focus on how grateful and blessed I am to be where I am and don’t think through the details of how it could be different. Seeing Muna was like experiencing what could have been. This could be me, I could have been born in a village in the middle of nowhere, been married at the age of 13 and started having children as soon as I was able. I could have never experienced a childhood, never had any freedom, never experienced Truth or Love.

She was married off to an old man before she even understood what was happening and now this is her life, she has no choice…she doesn’t even understand the concept of a choice or that there are women in the world who don’t have their entire lives dictated by their fathers and their husbands. Mona didn’t know what her husband does for a job, nor did she know where he was when I talked with her…she hadn’t seen him for a week.

While I was sitting with her, struggling to grasp any understanding of her life she was struggling to do the same thing with me. How could I leave my house, much less my country, without being escorted by a man from my family? Why was I so old and not married? Why did I not have 6 children? Why did I waste my time getting an education in grade school instead of learning to cook and clean and take care of animals?

Mona and I are completely different and yet we are so similar…that very well could be me.

Wal Mart

Now that I'm back in the Sandbox it's time to get back to 'normal' life, if that's what you want to call life in the Sandbox. I went to one of our grocery stores here to pick up some things and just to see what was new and I was shocked and amazed at my choices.

I'll just list a few of the things for you: spaghetti sauce, taco seasoning, pop-tarts, fruit loops, American pringles, chocolate icing, and off-brand hamburger helper (of all things!!).

And the things were even cheap!! Well, cheap in comparison to how expensive imported things are here. For instance, the spaghetti sauce that would have cost $1 in the states was $4 and the pop tarts were $6 but still, I sure did grab a can of spaghetti sauce! And then there were the American pringles. What's sad is that we have arab pringles and then we have all these local knock off brands...a surprisingly large number of knock off brands which is a little strange, but the cheapest I've ever seen any of these is $3 a can. But then this store had these imported American pringles for only $2 a can. Amazing! You might ask how did I know the difference between the Arab and American kinds? The American ones were written in Spanish, of course!

So I spent 30 minutes in this little grocery store that's about the size of a medium sized gas station in the states just marveling at all of these 'normal' things that they had. I felt like I was in WalMart. What am I going to do when I'm actually back home and in a real WalMart?!?!?!

Skin Cancer

I spent a little bit of time outside yesterday and, despite the sunscreen, got some sun. Last night I was visiting one of my local friends and she pointed out that my cheeks and my neck were a little red. I hadn't looked in the mirror all day so I didn't know if she was just over reacting b/c she's African and just hasn't seen a whole lot of sunburns or what but I didn't really care.

As I was leaving she said something to the effect of 'don't worry about the sun on your skin. You will have no problems. You can't get skin cancer here.' I actually laughed at her because I really thought she was joking but she was totally serious....something about the sun not being as strong here as it is in the States (even though we're closer to the equator here and it is SO much stronger) and then there was something about the hole in the ozone and how it's over America so we get UV rays there but they don't have a hole here so there are NO UV rays.

I didn't really know what to say but I seriously couldn't help but laugh. I tried to explain to her that it didn't matter where you were, the sun can always give you skin cancer and you have to take care of your skin but she knew what she was talking about and wasn't going to stop until she had convinced me not to worry and so I just gave up, listened to her for another 5 minutes, promised that I would wear a large straw hat or carry an umbrella with me next time, and then we left.

Today I was out with some totally unrelated friends and I asked them about skin cancer and they said the exact same thing. I'm not real sure where everyone was taught about all this but they were obviously taught wrong.

Realistically, I'm not worried that I'm going to get skin cancer after 4 hours in the sun...I am worried that my friends are going to get skin cancer after a lifetime of believing that they just 'don't get that here'.

More Rain

So I don't have any pictures of the new house yet...I haven't quite moved in all the way but I am sleeping in my own apartment now which is a step in the right direction. Anyways, here's a picture of my new road. It just keeps raining and apparently there's nowhere for the water to go. So the way we've been meeting our new neighbors is by picking them up on one side of the lake and dropping them on the main road a few blocks from here where the public transportation runs. Of course I'm not doing that by myself and it's just when we're on our way somewhere so no one panic that I've started picking up hitchhikers or anything.

Now we're just hoping for a few dry 120 degree days in a row (Who in their right mind hopes for that?!?!) so that our walls and roads can get really good a dried and hopefully the weird smell will go away!

Ode to a Kitchen Window

It rained last night...I know that's not a big deal to those of you who live in places where it rains but around here it doesn't happen all that often and, since we're living in a new house, rain means a huge ordeal.

I woke up last night b/c the air smelled like water (kind of weird, I know but again, rain isn't the norm) and thought 'dang it. It's the middle of the night and I have to get out of bed just b/c it's raining'. So I got up and started closing windows...turns out that wasn't necessary but it's a new house so what do I know.

It rained about an hour and for pretty much the entire hour rain was gushing in from any and every hole in the wall. We don't just have holes in the walls but I mean like air coolers and windows and doors. Remember how I talked about the workers putting in really nice things for us? Well we have these amazing windows. They close tightly and are even weather sealed. I haven't seen anything like them since I moved to the Sandbox...too bad they didn't fill the gaps between the cement in the wall and the frame of the window!!! So I guess the problem isn't necessarily with the window but more with the wall? I don't know.

What I do know is that in the middle of the night I was throwing things out of unpacked boxes, desperately trying to find any towels to clog up the holes. Guess if I wanted to be really optimistic it was a jumpstart to the unpacking. And the electricity did stay on the whole time so at least I wasn't trying to do all this in the dark.

But then there was the kitchen window. It didn't leak, not one drop. The only window in the entire house that did not leak like an open faucet. It was even on the 'wrong' side of the house, the side where the wind was blowing the rain in. So yep, all these fancy windows and one of them has fulfilled it's purpose....now to try and track someone down who understands the concept of a window keeping out rain and dirt and can somehow fix our problems.

On another note, one of the fancy air coolers caught on fire last night. We turned it on and 5 minutes later the house was filling up with smoke. So we turned it off but what else can you really do but stand and look up at it, hoping that the smoke will stop coming. It did eventually, but only after the entire house was filled with that wonderful burning motor/melting rubber smell. We left the windows open to hopefully help to air it out...then it rained...there's just never a dull moment around here!

Zanzibar (aka beautiful island paradise)

Zanzibar is pretty much the most beautiful place I've ever been...in the entire world. The sand was so fine that it felt more like clay than sand and the water was amazing. We went to a less 'touristy' part of the island so there were very few foreigners around and lots of locals. I loved that there were just normal people going about their everyday lives in this amazingly beautiful place.

You know you're still in Africa when....

During low tide you could see tons of these sticks. The women would string rope between the sticks and collect seaweed and then come and retrieve it and bring it back to the beach. I'm not sure what they do with the seaweed but it was really cool to watch them working.

The fishing boats would be anchored way out from the beach during high tide and then when low tide came they would all be stuck in the sand.

This guy...he has on the same kind of jalabiya that the people in my country wear but notice the swimshorts underneath...I'm not real sure what exactly the men around here wear under theirs but I'm pretty sure that it's not swim shorts!!

Safari

While I was out of the country I took a vacation to visit some friends and see some more of Africa. The safari was lots of fun, we saw plenty of animals and had a great time reliving 'Lion King' but this time in real life! I won't bore you with lots of pictures of animals although I've got plenty. My favorite part of the entire safari was...well actually I had two favorite parts. The first was the sunsets. There is just nothing like an African sunset. My second favorite time was when it started raining. My friends were all disappointed because we had to close up the roof but I was so excited...I hadn't seen rain in 8 months!!!

Here's the hippo pond. There are really lots of hippos under the water, they just didn't come up very often and I wasn't ever quick enough to snap a picture. And then, if you can see them, a few giraffes just hanging out under the tree.

My friend and I standing in the safari car.

New House

I arrived back home last week. We had been planning to move for a while but the timing of my traveling didn't work out well and, since I had to stay longer than I'd expected, the date that we had to be out of our old apartment came and went without me. My wonderful friends packed all of my stuff and moved it for me so that when I arrived back home I didn't even know where I was living. Good thing they picked me up at the airport or I would have been totally lost!!

So now I'm living with some friends while trying to play catch up from the last 3 months away and trying to unpack my new apartment into some semblance of normalcy...it's pretty crazy! The workers supposedly had finished my apartment and only had the few little 'touch ups' to finish. They worked really hard and they made a serious effort to make it nice and to add in the little things that they thought I would really appreciate.

For instance, they put in a round sink. Around here I've only seen square sinks. I'm not real sure where they got this round one and I appreciate the effort, I really do. But when I was washing dishes and the kitchen was flooding I just wanted to say 'can I trade this round sink for any shape of sink that has a pipe underneath it?' That's right. They were so focused on the sink that they forgot to hook up any plumbing underneath!!!

Then there's my room. They let me request what colors I wanted to paint the walls and, without seeing the room or the colors since I was living in the bush at the time, I chose some and figured that if they even got close it could work. Now my room has 2 walls of dull paint and 2 walls of shiny paint and I guess some people would say that they almost kind of got the colors close. Althought at this point I just want a place to live so I could care less, but it's kind of funny!

There are plenty more of these little things that just make life funny. Air coolers that require water without any water hooked up, doors without handles that are impossible to close without them...really the list goes on. I guess that's what happens when you move houses in Africa, no matter if the house is new or not!!!