Training Village Home

I have now left the training village behind but I have not written all that I want to about the training village.   The people are amazing.  The village is truly a community.  Children can wander without fear and people will look out for them.  If someone is hungry they will be fed.  The people have little compared to Americans but will share it all.

The country is flat but with many trees.  The mango trees are my favorite of course.  I have been eating fresh mangoes ever since I go here.  But as the season wore on the fruit bats got more active.  When it is dark, they come out and go after the mangoes.  Thankfully I never had an up close and personal contact with them but from watching them shoot across overhead I would say that their wing span is at least a foot across and many are larger.  Once they come out at night you can hear mangoes thudding to the ground.  I don't see much evidence of them eating the  mangoes on the ground so I imagine that they land on the mangoes to eat them and their weight makes the stem break.  But that is just my theory.

I wanted to include pictures from my compound.  The first set of pictures are of my living quarters.  Peace Corps has specifications of what need to be in the trainees' housing.  So mine met all of the qualifications with the added bonus of a gekko in the ceiling.  The two yellow things in the corner are my bedongs.  One of them holds water from an open well that I used for bathing and clothes washing.  The other bedong holds water from a tap that I use for drinking.  My sister had to go about 1/3 of a mile to haul that water back.  But it is much safer to drink since debris and dead animals cannot fall into it.  The bedongs originally held cooking oil.  They use a lot of cooking oil here.  The shelves you see are my dresser.  But I considered myself lucky because everyone did not get a set of shelves.  The bucket is what I used for my bucket bath.  I will tell you that bucket bath was wonderful as a bedtime ritual.  I would be hot and sweaty and that would cool me off just in time for bed.  It was a good thing.

The picture below is the front door to my room.  If you look closely you can see  a corrugated metal door.  I had similar doors on all of the windows and back door.  They were good for privacy and safety.  But, boy, when they were all closed the room got stinky -- a very humid smell.

Here is a picture of my ceiling on top of which the gekko crawls.  This is a fake ceiling  underneath a corrugate ceiling.  It is made from bags that contained some kind of nasty chemical from what I can read but I am the 5th or 6th PCV to occupy the room so no one has died from the ill effects.

This is obviously my bed.  The pink is mosquito netting, an absolute must have.  The mosquitoes are vicious here.  I never see or hear them but I am covered with bites.  It is disgusting.  The blue thing is a fabulous camp towel given to me at my retirement party.  I highly recommend it -- very absorbent and dries quickly.  There is also a blue trunk provided by the Peace Corps next to my bed.  It has two padlocks but also served well as a bedside table.

The next one is my water filter.  I would pour the water from the tap bedong into the top of the filter.  It ran through some ceramic filters into the holding tank below.  Then, when I was doing what I was supposed to, I would put 3 drops of bleach into a liter of the water.  Then it was safe for human consumption.  Take note of the mango on the desk.

So that was my home sweet home up until this past Saturday.  Stay tuned for pictures of my new place once I have it put together.

Cross your fingers for my language test.