How Bore-ing

A lot of people have asked me about the drinking water situation here. No, we don’t have running water. I take a bucket bath every night and Alicia and I each have basins in our room that we use to wash our faces and brush our teeth. I promise it sounds worse than it is, but oh how I do miss running water sometimes!

We get our drinking water and everything-else water from boreholes. A borehole is a well that’s been drilled down way way deep into one of the dried riverbeds around here. The water comes from so far down that it’s perfectly safe to drink, but it has…a taste. It tastes like a mixture between salt and metal…mmm. Thank goodness for Crystal Light!

Life here revolves around the sun – it’s up by 6:30 AM and it sets by 7:00 PM. “Sleeping in” is 7:00 AM – by that point the sun is so bright you’re not going to get any more sleep anyway. It is DARK at night here – so dark that you can see all the stars in the sky. We can see the Milky Way! I don’t miss the city lights when I can see a sky like this one every single night. By “missionary midnight” every night (9:00 PM) we’re well on our ways to going to sleep.

But back to the title of the blog entry – we have these *lovely* bugs here that are carpenter bees…or the African version of a carpenter bee. They bore holes in wood. Guess what? All of the supporting beams in our little house are wood. These bees seem to think that our support beams are their home. Alicia and I strongly disagree.

It would be fine if these bugs weren’t so stinking loud. Every morning at 6:00 they come in our open windows and start buzzing around, trying to find a hole that we haven’t duct-taped over in our feeble effort to tell them they aren’t welcome. A single bee buzzing in my room will wake me from the deepest slumber – it’s like an African alarm clock but it leaves a mess behind. I’ve managed to kill quite a few of them (so THAT’S why I packed those other shoes!) but they STILL KEEP COMING BACK. You’d think they would get the message when all of their buddies quit buzzing around…nope. There are a few persistent ones that will be dead soon…that is a promise.

If you get a chance this week, say hello to flushing toilets, chocolate chips, fresh fruits & vegetables, pants & shorts, reliable power sources, and high speed internet for me J