The last 3 weeks have gone by a lot faster than I thought they would. Language training has been put on the back burner, and instead we've finally begun to concentrate on the technical details of water sanitation work. On one day, the entire Water San sector came to my homestay village and built a soak pit and washing area. For those of you W.S.-ignorant as I once was, a soak pit is a pit dug near latrines, pumps, and washing areas, where the water can sink into the ground and be reabsorbed instead of sitting on the surface accumulating fungus and letting mosquitos breed. Yes, it's valuable, important, and it was the first time that I felt truly useful in this country so far. That grand feeling was fleeting though, as the next time we met as a sector, most of what we did consisted of unnecessary field trips to tour offices and hear dull speakers give lectures which could have been sufficiently consolidated onto a piece of paper and an explanatory sentence. In some ways, it has been frustrating to be spending so much time doing so little other than preparation, but knowing that I will be officially installed at my site and back to feeling as if I'm in way over my head within a week makes me feel oddly better.
Homestay wasn't altogether without incident. I had perhaps my most culturally frightening experience as I cut my hair on afternoon outside my house and watched the children living in my housing concession swarm me like moths to a bulb trying to get at my shorn locks. At first, they were just gathering them from off the ground, but soon started shoving hands in my face to be the first to get the fallen locks. After gathering a sufficient handful, they would run off somewhere and come back empty-handed for more. I was honestly more creeped out that I had been since the first time I tried eating "to" (see earlier entries). I was half expecting a voodoo doll or some West African equivalent to show up on my pillow the next day. It was only later that I learned that the hair was buried and this practice was just a measure to make sure none of it would accidentally get into food. However, there are a number of traditional medicinal and other ritual crafts still practiced that use white-people hair as the main ingredient, and apparently there might be a small profit to be made the next time I give myself a trim.
As the end of homestay began to approach, so did the beginning of Ramadan, which was an exciting excuse for me to tell everyone in the village that as a Jew, I did not in fact fast on Ramadan but I had at least another half dozen excuses throughout the year to feel their pain. The village spent a week planning a going away party for the 4 of us PCTs who were leaving, and only on the day of the party did someone realize that it was already the 4th day of the holiday and there were no parties allowed, so instead, a goat was sacrificed in our honor and served over dinner.
Coming back to Tubani So, it was good to see all the PCTs again in once place. We've been retelling our wild stories, the most interesting involving 4-goat orgies, adult cats feeding from the breasts of dogs, and of course sharing news of all of our latest illnesses (so far, I've mainly just had to deal with a couple weeks of dysentery which has served to teach me only that dysentery isn't nearly as scary as its made out to be in "The Oregon Trail"). The rest of our time has been spent attending last-minute seminars about last-minute details involving such crucial issues such as how much we're getting paid and when, watching bootlegs of The Dark Knight that at least 3 people have had sent to them, and packing up and preparing for the next 2 years of our lives. I've been thinking about a good number of things, some of them important like exactly which projects I will be trying to start up once I get to site, some of them more philosophical like what it would be life if I came back to America and "The Simpsons" has gone off the air (I can't remember a time before Homer and Bart only took vacations from their Sunday night schedule during baseball playoffs season).
In anticipation of my impending beginning of service following Friday's Swearing-In Ceremony, I should warn you all that I have no real idea of when I will be able to have any internet access once I move to my site. I will be living 40 km from the nearest electrical sockets, so finding a time and place to go online to update blogs and email is still up in the air. In the meantime, you can now check out some photos I've managed to upload on our painfully slow server here at Tubani So. This is only a small fraction of everything I've shot, but it's the best I can do for now, so check them out at www.flickr.com/photos/29040473@N02 and enjoy. Also, drop me a line at yacob118@hotmail.com if you feel like you ever need to send some care packages or letters my way and I'll give you my mailing address. Otherwise, perhaps one more update to come before I ship out to site, so until next time, keep on enjoying your happy rich country and know that at least one of your friends is equally enjoying his happy life in the developing world.
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