This is what happens when I haven't had internet for 3 weeks!
8/1 Well, if I’m to be honest, the last month has been rough for me. It is now August 1st, and I am still unsure when we will be leaving our home-stay. It is only supposed to last a month but because of a lot of unfortunate circumstances we may be staying here for two months.
Living with a local family is difficult because they really become your parents. They want to know where we are going and what we are doing. I’ve never missed simply being able to decide where I’m going to go and when and how I’m going to do it. I’ve never missed so much being able to decide what I’m going to eat and making it myself. I do feel blessed by this family and trust and love the Father’s will but that is hard when you’ve just had your hair pulled, snot blown on you, crunched something mysterious in your rice, and woke up at 6am every day to do it.
I’m also dealing with the fact that I am an introvert. For a long time I’ve denied it, I like people, but not all the time. I need alone time. It’s hard not to feel guilty about needing that. It’s even harder not feeling inadequate because of that.
Anyway, those are my troubles and my struggles confessed so that members of the Body might lift me up in yarp. I really appreciate it.
This week has not been without it’s fun and lovely moments. Tuesday was our house mother’s birthday. Her husband had planned this huge surprise party. He invited tons of people and ordered a cake and wazwan. People here love meat! That is wazwan. It is just different varieties of mutton and some chicken, and maybe other stuff, but let’s be honest, there’s really no way of knowing what is in a large ball of meat. Of course, no pork of any kind. We had 5 varieties of wazwan. If we ever go to a real wazwan meal we will be treated to 13 courses of meat. Oh boy! We have been eating the leftovers for the last 5 days. Our house mother says she does not like to have meat every day, but Kallie and I are not complaining after several weeks of almost all veggies! The most famous wazwan for this area is these meatballs (mutton, I think) that have been boiled in milk. And don’t worry, we have discussed the th.ological implications of eating meat boiled in its mother’s milk. J
Anyway, so this party was a big surprise. She did not know much until the day before. You really can’t keep a surprise from the woman of the house. She was whisked away by our supervisor for a few hours while we decorated. When they came back we forcefully (seriously, two held her arms and one tied) blindfolded her and led her into the house. Everyone yelled surprise and we all had a good party.
In this house, there seems to be a lot of communication that goes on that we don’t know about or understand. Partly because of language barriers, but I think also because it’s just a high-context culture—thanks Dr. Miller. With two days notice our house sister left us on Thursday morning. I have heard different things as to when she will return if ever. We don’t really know. We were very sad to see her go because she was our best friend here and we had a lot of fun with her. Yarp that God makes clear His will for her life.
Sorry, these get really long. I’ve always been long-winded, as you probably know. Here is one final story because I know you are all wondering about the title of this blog. I walk this little dirt road to my language helper almost every day around the same time. It seems like a pretty small community. I like that walk because it reminds me of home a little—dirt road, cows, and some fields! So when these people see this American girl dressed in local clothes walking down this road at around the same time every day, they start to wonder. I always try to greet people so that I can start to get to know people there and maybe make some friends. So on Friday I stopped to talk to this girl that I often see, but had never really chatted with. She spoke some English which is really good! We exchanged greetings and she told me that she was married and had a 3-year-old, whom she happened to be waiting for as he was riding the bus home from school. That’s right, read that sentence again. He’s 3 and going to school on a bus. I was surprised that she had a little boy because she looked very young. She told me she was 21 and said that I am 21 too! I then said that I am not even close to being married. She got a slightly astonished look on her face and told me that she hear I had married here. I laughed and told her that I was not married. I mean, I’ve only been here about a month! Apparently rumor on the dirt road was that I had married a local. I can only imagine the new rumors that will spread about me. So just to reassure everybody, especially Dr. Frost, I am not married, I did not marry here, and I am still as single as I was when I left! My family here was quite amused by this story.
8/14 Life is quite different since that last entry but I figured I’d still post it so y’all can understand what I’ve been going through. Two days ago we were able to move to the apartment that it was planned we’d live in. It was a long complicated decision to move here, but because of many different factors we decided it was time to get out of our homestay house.
So the place of our homestay is roughly 15 minutes across town from our new apartment. This is a little unfortunate because last week we started teaching English to some high school age girls in our homestay community. We were having a lot of fun with it and hope to make it there to teach three times a week. The situation here makes that difficult though, and impossible to plan. Yarp that we can still influence this group of teenagers and for practical things like us planning good lessons, being able to get to their house, and their being able to come over to ours sometimes.
Let me just give you some details on what life can be like here. Some days we have military curfew here, which pretty much means we can walk down the street from our house but not really anywhere else. Those curfews are put in place because of the many young men who pelt stones at the military police. The military police then fire shots around these young men and many people die and get hurt. Just yesterday four people died in our state, only one in our city though. Two weekends ago around 23 people lost their lives. It’s heartbreaking to see this cycle of violence. It’s even worse to know that these people are probably sacrificing their lives for a freedom that will not come as a result, and they are sacrificing without any hope in the Father and His Son.
This month is also Ramadan. This means that the people here fast all day and eat after sunset and before sunrise. Today is the third day. If the Father leads you, I think it would be cool if some of you could take a day this month to fast and yarp for the people of this area. Yarp that innocent lives can stop being lost. Yarp that people will be thirst for the truth of our Father. Yarp for wise decisions by the politicians that in some ways encourage a lot of this violence. Yarp for the people who are struggling to feed their families because they have been out of work for so long because of all of the strikes.
There’s just so much I could write about life here! I’ll try to stick to the highlights though.
So this last Thursday we moved to a new community. I could really use a smooth transition. Please yarp that we can quickly find some girls to connect with around here and start building relationships. Also, a big reason we moved here is because our project here is to do teacher training sessions in some local schools in this area. We would love for schools to open back up so we could do that. Please talk to the Father about that too.
When we got here on Thursday we thought the apartment would be clean. Turns out our cleaning person had not really gotten here yet. There was a local single man living here before so I’ll leave most of what this place looked like to your imagination. Allow me to give a few hints though. There was a used tea bag on the bathroom floor. The oven was covered with sticky grease mystery goo. Those of you who appreciate my aversion to sticky things will be pleased to know that I cleaned that goo. By the end of a few hours though, with the help of the cleaning lady, it was very clean. We went shopping for house supplies after cleaning. We went to this little store where we pointed to all of the kitchen supplies we wanted and a nice young man took them down for us. After we rung up the total, it took Kallie’s, mine, and our supervisor’s money to pay for it all. The next stop was the ATM!
Yesterday, we decided it was time for a day of rest. We hadn’t really had one in about 40 days. It was really good. The landlord’s live two floors above us and I think we will be close with them. Our supervisors used to live here so that relationship has already been established which is lovely. We also had already met them when we first arrived in the city and had a meal with them. They have two young boys close to our age. Let’s just say the local men around here are NOT unfortunate looking! J We went up to talk to their mom, but she wasn’t there. They were bored and hungry though (remember Ramadan) so they were pleased to have us as entertainment. We played some bored games for quite a while and then excused ourselves to go down to our apartment. What we neglected to tell them is that we were going down to eat supper because we were hungry. We try not to rub in our freedom in the Son. In fact, on Thursday our supervisor had a pepsi in her car that she was drinking as we shopped. While we were driving, she would look around her for any Mus. and then quickly take a drink so nobody would see. It was pretty entertaining.
So yesterday we had our first attempt at truly cooking for ourselves. We were trying to make local food the way we had watched our homestay mother do it so many times. Unfortunately she never let us help because she didn’t want us to mess it up. This is understandable because she was feeding 16 people much of the time. So I cooked some veggies with some spices and Kallie made some rice. None of it turned out. I can cook at home, but our meal last night was awful. We were sitting on our floor eating…slowly…and laughing about how terrible it was. We called our home stay mother to tell her about our awful meal. She was quite amused and congratulated us on our attempts. A few minutes later one of the less than unfortunate looking landlord’s sons knocked on our door. Kallie scrambled for her dupatta (in other words her virtue) and answered the door. He brought us some pudding they had eaten to break their fast. Kallie thanked him and told him how awful our food tasted. He left and we laughed some more about our food. Not two minutes later he arrived again to tell us his mother wanted us to come upstairs and eat with them. We did, feeling stupid all along. She is a great cook, though! Tonight, we’re making foreigner’s food!
Duppattas!
So I think I’ve mentioned this garment a few times, but please allow me to elaborate. We like to refer to them as our virtue. They’re these long pieces of fabric, various materials, about 6 feet long. I’m only 5 feet tall. Starting to get the picture. Their purpose is modesty, because I’m apparently not modest enough in my big pants and long, loose shirt. They’re supposed to help cover women. In some more modern places, people might get to wear them more like a scarf. Here though, we have to wear them draped across our front and hanging over our shoulders. My shoulders were not created for this. My duppattas fall off of me all of the time, when I’m walking, bending over, standing, etc. On the other hand, men can walk around in shorts and T-shirts, sweatpants, tank tops, jeans, pretty much whatever they want. It’s a great injustice! Probably the most frustrating is that no matter how covered up I am, the men still gawk and stare. Thus far, the best responses we can say in the language to this are “go look at your wife,” “go away,” and the personal favorite of my home stay crazy mama, “What? You’ve never seen a woman before?”
