Buckets, Bamboo, and Bushmen

K...updates from today...

Last night, I washed my clothes in buckets on on the balcony, by the light of the moon only. It was actually kinda cool. I kept wondering how I could outsource my laundry, but realized that this is how most people in the world live, and I should suck it up and embrace the experience. :)

I had similar thoughts this morning as I was hauling water up the stairs in buckets/containers to fill our water supply in the bathroom (for bathing, "flushing", laundry, etc). 8 girls go through a ton of water each day...and that's even with us conserving.

Today, besides teaching, we hauled tons of bamboo logs up the hill for building an addition to the school. It was actually kind of cool...the parents from the village came to help. The men split the bamboo in half long-ways, and the women had machetties (sp?) and were clearing the ground.

The other day at school, one of the assignments for the class from their Ghanaian teacher was to write about their school. He told them to lie to make it interesting, to say it was a nice school building, with 20 classrooms, including a computer room. If you could see their school, and then take that comment in context, it would break your heart. We are so spoiled back home.

Also today, we were finishing up teaching, and we were interrupted by the bushmen hunting for "ground-eaters" (which are basically HUGE rodents). There were about 6 or 7 of them, with just as many small dogs, and they were running around and yelling like banchees with machetties. They would send the dogs to run the ground-eaters through the bush, then they'd run to the other side and try to corner the rats, and they hacked them almost to pieces. It was quite a distraction, to say the least...but pretty entertaining.