Help, Help, I'm being repressed!

As our time in Haydom is drawing to a close Betsy and I have been waxing nostalgic about our time here… wait, what, not us! Ok, that part about being sad is a total lie; I can’t wait to sink my teeth into a bag of cassava chips. That being said, we have to give a shout out to all of you who sent us packages, you’re the best! My parents, Betsy’s parents, my sisters, Ryan and Tamara in Tampa and I can’t forget my aunts, Kathi, Mary, Patti and Vicki, THANKS; you all ROCK! Since the packages arrived, as you all know on Christmas Eve (“a Christmas Miracle” exclaimed by both Betsy and my Mom), we have been pretty much eating exclusively from said boxes of goodies and we don’t feel the least bit guilty!

In one of those boxes came a giant bag of Hersey’s chocolate (thanks Mom and Dad) and in another was a package of balloons (thank you Zillig girls). At my first point of reflection these goodies are relatively un-noteworthy until we realized that our family has never had balloons or chocolate in their lives! We gave our family a sizable bag of chocolate, among other things, which their four and two year old children commenced consuming as soon as we handed the goodies over. We tried to stress, in vain, that they should eat the candy pole, pole (very slowly). Within the hour Upendo, the four year old had a tummy ache and Wesley was bouncing off the walls! We went over to have dinner with our family that evening to see that Upendo and Wesley, normally in bed at this time of night, were still up running around with the balloons, which were in and of themselves a HUGE hit! Stefano asked if we wanted to take Wesley for the remainder of the evening, we politely declined, sorry about that, no more sugar for our family. All in all our Christmas was a good one, I having just recovered from the flu was elated by the plethora of snacks, thank you again!

Time has been passing by rather slow lately, but passing which makes me think of my sister, Sarah and my Mom. As look in the mirror and brush my hair, yes it’s long enough that I need to brush it daily now, I am constantly reminded of Sarah; essentially as my hair grows longer I look more and more like her. It doesn’t help that Betsy keeps calling me “Sarah”. Also, I feel like I’m turning into my mother, I’ve been eating white bread, with butter on it, chocolate (since the boxes arrived), and candy! I know, I can’t believe it either, but I guess that’s what you do when the only other option is ugali.

That being said, the eight guests, who were staying at our family’s 750 square foot house, have left. This is a great thing for Betsy and my personal hygiene since we have had to resort to using scrap paper as toilet paper as of late. Since the family friends were in town we have had a drastic shortage of usable TP, luckily they left and we didn’t resort to Betsy’s surveys, but it was close!

Speaking of being disgusting, one of our research assistants mopped our floor for us. She came over to transcribe with Betsy and was apparently disgusted enough by our American filth, apparently people here mop their floors every day, not once a week like us, that she had to stop and mop the floor. I loved how someone who bathes twice a week was telling Betsy and I how disgusting we were because the floor wasn’t clean enough to eat from… oh well, we have freshly mopped floor so I won’t complain, too much.

As Betsy’s survey is coming to a close, she only needs seven more to hit the 300 mark (100 more than she originally planned) she’s been getting more adept to entering the data. Drastic increase of data entry efficiency has afforded her time to play Mine Sweeper, the cheesy little game that comes with Windows, non-stop! I really think by the time we head out from Haydom that she will be a grand-master of Mine Sweeper, if there is such a thing. I’m constantly reminding her to return to her data-entry which I receive the response, “I am doing data entry, I just needed a little break… ok only 10 more tries at the advanced level, I have to beat 200 seconds!” I think this game has created a monster.

Out in the village this week we spied a woman stacking mud, yep Monty Python and the Holy Grail style! The initial reaction was that she must be doing this for some reason but neither Betsy nor I could find any discernable rationale. She was just in the middle of her yard, digging mud and stacking it into nice little piles. This display of non-sense made us run home and check out our copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the part where Arthur is speaking to the communist “mud-stackers”. We’ve decided to stop being oppressed as well, on to eating more Honey Wheat Pretzels, yum!
-Ryan