My Shoes

                Oh what a day. There was a lot of goings on but I’m going to start with a story from yesterday.

                So Mui is the little girl that lives with us with her mom. They’ve been here almost as long as we have and to be honest I’m starting to wonder if they’re leaving because they came for a visit. Anyway, Mui is not shy around us at all which can get kind of annoying. She walks in on us working a lot and it can be hard to get her to leave us alone. Yesterday she slapped Whitney in the face just because it was there so Whitney kicked her out of the lab. Later that day I was walking back to the hostel with my computer and the children came running. Devali is one of the children who gets really excited when he sees us and he got to me first and took my free hand. Mui was in the group of not winners which is not her favorite spot but she dealt with losing pretty well. She still wanted to get in on the hand action though so she just grabbed my hand anyway. Then she started jumping on it like red rover. When we got to the street and were crossing it. Mui jumped on mine and Devali’s hand and just like in red rover, our hand fell apart except she wasn’t expecting it and she was a couple feet above the ground and landed on her face. She started crying so it was sad but at the same time she deserved it and she had dirt all over her face so that was kind of funny.

                Ok so today we were just working on our sweet potatoes. After we finished taking water activity after breakfast, Whitney and I started our laundry. She had tons and I had a towel so we both had a lot of work but she probably had more because she was using two buckets and I could fit everything in one. After lunch we rinsed them off and hung them outside on the line and decided to watch Hancock because we didn’t have anything planned for the afternoon. We didn’t get very far into the movie before the lady that cleans our rooms came in. She doesn’t speak English so I have a really hard time communicating with her but Whitney actually does it pretty well. They had a little small talk and then she told Whitney that our clothes had fallen. That’s an issued because there’s dirt under the line so we went out there and lo and behold. The line had broken and all of the clothes were in the dirt. We started laughing a picked them up while our cleaning lady fixed the line. Whitney put her clothes back up and I put most of mine back up except for my towel because I figured it was just too heavy for the line. Yeah, it was another week of drying most of my clothes in my room but I didn’t have too much this time. It was mostly socks.

                After lunch, Whitney and I were walking back to the hostel and some older boys came to walk us there. The older kids like to ask us for stuff. This time, Manuel asked me for my shoes. Whitney had a water bottle from lunch and didn’t stop to talk so I was with the boys and she was a few feet ahead of me. Anyway, I told Manuel I wasn’t giving him my shoes because they’re my shoes. The conversation went back and forth for a while with him talking about shoes and me saying “my shoes” Then he started yelling a Whitney and gesturing towards her. I told them that her name was Whitney and they started yelling her name at her. She would turn around and wave but then keep walking. Then they would turn back to me and call me “my shoes”. It was so funny. When we got back to the hostel, we told Nicolle and Camille and Nicolle started telling everybody else that my name was “my shoes”. She was so excited because I’ve wanted a name that people can say here. It’s frustrating to tell people my name because they have a really hard time saying it. I even told Devali my name was “my shoes” when I went to get my computer from the office. He thought it was funny.

                I think it was later that we were in the bathroom and Camille was looking in the mirror and asked if we knew why her hair was the way it is. I thought it was a pretty obvious question but I answered it anyway and told her it was because she was half black. She wasn’t talking about how her hair is curly apparently because the answer was because it was dirty. Go figure. I thought it was pretty obvious that we were all pretty dirty. As time goes on, the less motivated we are to take showers. It’s kind of gross but only if you’re around clean people.

                After dinner, we changed to work out and got the brines ready for a new run. While we waited I got on Facebook to see if anything new was happening. Sarah was online so I started talking to her and then Whitney jumped in and started talking to her. We had a lot of energy last night and it was fun to see if Sarah would figure out she wasn’t talking to me. She didn’t as far as I know. It was funny.

                It was an eventful day. I’m loving it here. It’s crazy that I’m almost at the halfway point and it’s still weird to me to think about the fact that I’m here and that I’ve adapted to this place that’s so different from home. I’m so glad I was able to come.