Good Things

Today I got a care package from my mom, it was so sweet. To most of you, this might not sound like anything great, in fact, just about everyone I know who lives overseas gets care packages on a regular basis, but, here in this wonderfully developed country that I live in, there is no mail system. They just don't have one. It's not that it's slow or unreliable, there actually aren't addresses and definitely no postal system which makes the whole care package idea a little more difficult. You might be wondering how this whole care package thing worked. Well, my supervisor has been in the states all summer in TX not far from my parents, so my mom filled an entire suitcase with wonderful surprises (70 lbs exactly!!) and sent it with him.

This afternoon, all the girls from my team came over. We waited until everyone was here and then opened it together...it was like Christmas only better! We were all so excited to get clothes and food and good stuff from the states. M&Ms, hundreds of packets of kool aid (gotta stay hydrated in the desert), pepperoni (turkey, of course, the real stuff is contraband!), muffin mixes, pants, shorts, shirts, pens, and, my personal favorite, the rain gauge. The rain gauge might sound a little odd, but the one time it rained alot we were interested to know how much and you can't even find an umbrella here, much less a rain gauge. Plus we figure that it can be used to measure sand too!

We all even enjoyed an afternoon snack of popcorn with M&Ms and Reeses Pieces mixed in. Don't get me wrong, we're not usually just all sitting around, hanging out at 4 on a Monday afternoon, but the riots are continuing and they're moving out of downtown (ie. closer to us, but not too close yet) so just to be safe we all had to kind of stay where we were, which just happened to be in my living room!

So thanks mom and whoever else helped to put this package together. I can only begin to express how much it meant to me and to the girls here.

...At this point, most everyone I know would have included a picture of everything they got neatly arranged on a table. However, we were so excited that things got spread all over the room and no one even thought about getting out the camera. So just imagine a small living room filled with something from every aisle of WalMart and that's what we looked like!

What Happens?

What happens when you live in a third world country and your corrupted government decides one day that they want to double the prices of gas and sugar? Riots....yep, apparently that's the only way that people in a non-democrative country know to make their voices heard. So yesterday was an interesting day, but everyone is fine. The activity was mainly focused in the downtown area, but just to be safe, we pretty much stayed home for most of the day. Today we'll stay close to home, avoid large and angry looking crowds, and only run the necessary errands. I don't even know if this made the news in the states or not, but for anyone who heard about it, it's not a huge deal and we're all just fine.

Cowboys!!!

I don't actually have satellite here, for multiple reasons, but the family next door does and they're willing to share (we go way back, they're not just random people) Yesterday, they were watching sportscenter (the US version comes on once a day) and noticed that our one American sports channel has on the schedule that they are gonna air the Cowboys-Saints game on Tuesday night!!! It's probably just a pre-season game or it might be from last season. (just last month we got to see the TX-USC Rose Bowl game...I was totally surprised by who won!) Either way, it's a cowboys game and I get to watch it! I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the idea of a fall with no football, but it turns out that this one channel that we have will air every Monday Night Football game and then some others. It might be the end of the week before we get it, but at some point we'll be able to watch.
So don't tell me who wins because I'll actually get to watch for myself!

Bangladesh

The other day I was in the souq shopping and just trying to relieve a little stress when an interesting question was posed. To preface, I had already walked by these 2 guys who ran this shop and heard them talking about me in Arabic and so I just went into the store (if that's what you want to call it) across from theirs. I wouldn't normally go into a store when the guys running it are messing with me, but they looked like they had some things that I wanted, so I decided to suck it up and see what they had. When I walked in I understood what they were saying under their breath to each other in Arabic, but ignored it. And then they started with the 'I love you' 'I want to marry you' stuff in English. And so, instead of making a disgusted face and leaving, I just looked at them like they were speaking in jibberish and I had absolutely no idea what they were saying. After about 5 minutes of me ignoring them, one asked me 'are you from Bangladesh?'. Again, I just looked at him like he was the crazy one and the reason why we couldn't communicate, and then he looked at his friend and said 'maybe she's from Thailand'. At this point, I couldn't help but laugh, so I made my exit.

But I'm learning that this 'I don't speak your language' approach really does work and they'll stop messing with you once they think that you don't understand the language they're speaking...so I've decided to ask the men here to speak Spanish. I've put alot of thought into this one. Around here, it's really a 50/50 chance that the person you're speaking to speaks English, so I can't just say that I don't understand them. But, if after they rattle off a little inappropriate English, I can ask them (in Arabic) if they speak Spanish...that could really put a stop to things. Technically, I didn't lie by saying that I speak Spanish, but I'm fairly certain that no one here actually does and if they think that's the language I want to speak, maybe they just won't talk to me!!! I haven't tested out the Spanish approach, so I'll have to let ya know how it works.

Reminders of Home

It's always a little strange the random things that you find overseas that remind you of home. On the way to the camel market on Friday, we passed this herd of longhorns. Now, I realize that these probably aren't genuine longhorns, but, for the Sandbox, they're close enough. I have to apologize to Lauren for posting a UT picture, but I can't help it that we're from TX and that she decided to leave us go to school at OU.

Camels

Part of my job here is to show people around the city, take them on an official city tour where we see the few cool things that we have in my town. On Friday, some of my friends and I went out and did the city tour thing so that when the short-term visitors come this month, it won't be my first time.
I'm not gonna lie, the tour isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world. There's the national museum which mainly consists of a lot of old rocks laying around where you can touch them...although I have heard that it's one of the nicer and more organized museums in this part of the world. But the cool thing about the museum is that you can actually walk into the ruins. They just excavate temples and things from the middle of the desert, then bring them here and put them in these tin buildings. Then they charge 50 cents to walk through them where you can actually touch the hieroglyphics and stuff. At first it felt kind of strange...these are the kinds of things that, back home, they don't even let you take pictures of in the museum, much less get close enough to carve your name into the wall! Random thought, but speaking of carving your name in the wall, the oldest name that we found was from 1861.

So here's a picture of me under this walkway that's from BC. If you look closely, you can see the pictures engraved in the stone.

After the museum, we did some other stuff, a little handicraft shopping, some lunch, and then it was out to the camel market. I had heard that the camel market was a ways out, but I didn't realize that the Sandbox definition of 'a ways out' was so much different than the Texan definition of 'a ways out. Basically, we drove to the end of the city, then to the end of the paved road, then to the end of the dirt road. You would think that at this point we might be close, but no...we still had another 10 miles to go through the desert. It was a rough ride, especially given that there are no roads and if you slow down too much, you'll sink into the sand and get stuck, so you just take the bumps and keep going.

This is a picture of us on our way. We had to stop and check something so we 'pulled off the road' so we wouldn't be in anyone else's way and then took advantage of the photo op. Our tour guide seriously made sure that we pulled off the road. He also kept telling us things like 'turn on that road' or 'at the next road we'll make a left'....what road???? Once we got out there, it was crazy. There weren't a whole lot of camels...apparently this is the off-season. But we did get to see a few camels and be the center of attention for a while.

When we got there, there were maybe 3 camel-herder guys. All the sudden, they just started coming from the middle of nowhere...seriously, you can see that we're in the middle of nowhere and I never figured out where they came from...they just kept appearing from the horizon. It was just so wierd to be the only foreigner. Here in the capital, there are tons of NGOs and foreigners so people don't tend to be surprised. Out here, kids were running away from us b/c they were scared. We let our tour guide do most of the talking for us, given our limited Arabic skills, but they were trying to figure out what language we were speaking for about 10 minutes before they finally asked. When we told them English, they were amazed. Then they asked if we were Chinese, to which we replied 'No, American', and then they were just awed to actually be seeing Americans.

The guys wanted to ride them, but these camel-herder guys wanted to charge an outrageous amount just b/c we're foreigners, but we live here, so we know that it should really be free, so no one rode, but they did let us take a picture for no charge. And then on the ride back, our tour guide took us a different way through some the refugee areas. Supposedly, these places used to be actual recognized camps but someone just decided that they didn't need the aid anymore and they closed them. There are still UNCEF compounds out there, but they're not being used. So now there's just a lot of really poor people living under tarps and in houses made of pretty much anything that they can find. Villages like this one are also full of people who are displaced from the war in the west.

The Grass Is Always Greener...

...when it rains!!! That's right folks, last night it finally rained for real! Supposedly, July & August are the 'rainy' months. Well, it didn't rain once in July and in the past week, it's sprinkled twice, so I've been a little disappointed with this so-called rainy season. I just figured that maybe, this being the desert and all, they thought that a few little sprinkles was rain. Was I wrong! Last night, the biggest storm that I've seen in the Sandbox rolled through around midnight. There was tons of lightning...no thunder, although I'm not sure why...and lots of wind and dust, but by the time I went to bed it still hadn't rained.

This morning, we woke up to lakes! The first picture is the courtyard that we see from our balcony. And then the second picture is the soccer field across the paved road. Every night there are 2 or 3 games going on...probably not tonight, although there have been kids out there playing all day long. This morning, the wind was blowing over the soccer field towards us and it was really a cool breeze.
On a sadder note, when it rains, even a little, all the refugee camps flood. There are tons of them all over around here and they all flooded just when it was sprinkles so I'm sure that today they are all completely underwater.

It's COLD in here!!!

The new apartment is great...we have coolers in each bedroom and they actually work. Now keep in mind that these aren't air conditioners. They actually do have air conditioners available here, but they are like the ones that you have in hotels that you have to turn on and off yourself. They use tons of electricity so they're a little pricey. No, in the new place we have swamp coolers, which basically means that there is a layer of something (I'm not really sure what) and there's a pump that gets it wet, then the cooler blows the air through that wet thing...that's it. And even with only that, it's blows significantly cooler air than just the fan. I actually find that I need to use a sheet while I'm asleep now b/c it can get cool.

Last night, one of my roommates and I were out doing some running around and when we got home around 11 we just sat in the living room and started talking. About 12, at the same time we looked at each other and said 'it's really cold in here', I actually had goosebumps! Out of curiosity we looked at the thermometer that we keep around and it was 84. I have to say, that's the coolest that I've seen it since I got here 4 months ago but it was just sad to realize that I was putting on layers and it was 84 in my living room. What am I gonna do when I come back to the states and everyone keeps their a/c set in the 70's?!

Life-changing

Something else I never thought I would say...this paved road has changed my life.

We moved into our new apartment (finally!!!) and it's really great. I will post pictures of it soon. Anyways, of course we live off of a dirt road b/c probably 90% of the roads here are dirt. We came to do a final check on the place on a Sunday and all the roads were dirt but when we moved in on Wednesday, the road that runs close to the apartment was no longer dirt. We don't really know when, but at some point between Sunday and Wednesday, they decided to pave that road. I'm not complaining...before the paved road, we had to make about a 5 minute walk to get to the closest paved road where we could catch public transportation. Now, I just step out of the gate and have no problem catching a rickshaw. And, it's really easy to give people directions b/c all you have to say is turn right on the paved road.

All this to say, I knew that life would be different over here, but I never actually expected that a paved road would change my life!

Girls

One of my roomates is teaching English at a woman's university here in K-town. Last night, we sat out on the balcony of our NEW apartment (!!!) and graded papers and chatted until midnight. Her students are all between 18-20 yrs old, studying to be doctors and pharmacists, but, in grading papers, we realized that all girls think alike. It doesn't matter what country you are from, what belief system you hold, girls just think alike. Their assignment was to write some 'I wish' statements. The most common ones were:
I wish I was thinner
I wish I looked like someone else
I wish that my hair was a different color
and finally....I wish that I was marriaged

I mean, I know that our cultures and ways of thinking are a lot different, but still when it comes down to it, we all kind of wish the same things.