Hut, Sweet Hut

Hut, sweet hut.

Well, Hello All!

We’ve been in Africa for over two months now. Our new hut is quite wonderful. It’s our very own round mud hut with a grass roof. Linds and I are doing our best to make our hut our home. We found camel mussels made of grass at market a few weeks ago and hung the up in our hut as baskets. We also bought several different kinds of fabric to weave into the roof of our hut. We haven’t got it put up yet, but it’s on our list. We also made little signs out of construction paper with some good passages on them during orientation at Emily’s, we hung them on the inside of our roof too.

Our new compound is quite different than our last home. We are now living in the chief’s compound. His name is Dego, he has two wives, Jemma and Laidy. Both of the women are pregnant…very pregnant. They are also super sweet. Jemma is taller and pretty quiet. She has a lot of patience and smiles at us a lot. Laidy is a bit shorter with a lively personality. She makes “ashia” for us almost every afternoon. Ashia is the extremely concentrated African version of sweet tea that comes in a shot glass. The first round is super strong, but rounds two and three are quite delightful. There are also lots of kids at our compound.

The kids have been the best and worst part of our new compound. The kids are super cute and they love to come over and hang out with us. However, since there were three girls from America that stayed in the same compound last year and those girls did not set any boundaries for the children, when we came in they did not respect the boundaries we attempted to establish when it came to us and our stuff. When we go out to our cabana (which is composed of six tree branches stuck in the ground with millet stalks on top), as Linds calls it, to read or study and the children swarm us. If I don’t sit all the way to the back of my chair the children try to crawl in the chair with me. If I’m attempting to journal, I’ll put my journal down for a second to try to get the kids out of my chair and before I know it my journal is missing and someone is writing “Halimatu”(the name of one of the children) in my shoe with my pen. Sometimes we just have to go to our hut and shut the door to get some alone time. It’s a rather stressful situation at times. Even when we go to our hut, this one child in particular refuses to leave us alone. She puts her arms through our windows, throws things through the windows and repeatedly says our names to get our attention. We tell her to leave, but she refuses or only leaves for a moment and then returns. Melissa is going to have a chat with the Chief and his wives on Monday to see if we can get these issues resolved.

The past three weeks have been far from normal. At the beginning of the month a volunteer team came to help in our area. There were eight of them and they all stayed at Melissa’s house, plus Rachel, who helped with translation, and Linds and I on the weekends. Melissa’s house was packed. The team turned out to be a huge blessing. They went to four different villages, including the one where we are staying at, and told a series of very significant stories and then they played games with the kids. A few of the villagers expressed interest and want to hear more stories, thanks to Father! They were also a huge blessing to Linds and I because we’ve been really lacking in male contact for the past couple months because in this culture men and women communicate from a distance and absolutely never display affection publically. It was refreshing to be able to joke around and play games with the guys on the team at Melissa’s house without having to worry about cultural boundaries. Still the last guy I hugged was my dad at the airport and Lindsay has been the only girl I’ve hugged pretty much the entire trip. This was culture shock for me because I got multiple hugs a day from guys and girls alike at school and at home and now I only occasionally get a hug from Lindsay. I think the thing I miss the most from home right now is physical contact because my number one love language is physical touch and people in this culture rarely touch.

This past week we have not been back out to the bush. We started to go out on Tuesday after Melissa got back from Niamey, but I got sick and I’ve been sick all week. We looked up my symptoms in “Where There is No Doctor,” and we’ve diagnosed me as having Giardia. I started taking medicine three days ago and it’s beginning to show signs of clearing up, but it’s been a pretty miserable week. So those of you reading this who knew how scared I was of getting a parasite…I got one and I’m still alive! Please continue to pr*y for me, I still feel really weak.

Over all things have been going pretty well. I’m looking forward to a fresh start on Monday.