Bathe Like a Malawian

We've been out of water since Thursday, so that has been pretty fun. We've managed pretty well and somehow Nicolle and I did some laundry. We have buckets in the bathroom area so that if the water does go out, we can still last a little while. Luckily that was the case for Nicolle and I this weekend. For a while we thought our sheets and clothes were going to sit in the soapy water all weekend, but a little bit of water was coming from the sinks, so we hurried and filled up some buckets with water to finish our laundry. Then we were going to shower, but by then, the water stopped working....so no luck with the shower. But then, by some miracle, the water started working yesterday!!! Wahoo!! The other women that were in our hostel filled up a bunch of buckets while the water was still going (what angels) so we were able to come back to the hostel last night happy as can be! I set up my filled buckets in the shower area and started splashing the water on me and everything just how they taught me. (Also, Nicolle gave me some tips too because she had just bathed as well.) It was kind of difficult because you have to squat down the whole time basically, but it was all so worth it! The water was a little chilly, and Renee had offered to heat it up for me, but I didn't feel like going through a whole other step before being clean again!
AND...
The cleaning lady even cleaned our sheets! Haha! We had no idea that she does that, so Nicolle and I had cleaned ours about two days before now. It was pretty comical. We had a good laugh about that. So it was the perfect night. Clean sheets, clean self. It was the best night of sleep I have had since I got here in May. Maybe that's the true secret of a good nights rest...well, maybe that's just for me.

On another note, there was a huge grasshopper in our hostel! I successfully got it out, but I've gotta say, I was a little scared that it was going to jump at me and attach to my face or something. That played in my head as I was getting it out, so I held the metal rod to get it out as far from me as possible, just in case. I was having a difficult time as I was outside getting it off the metal rod though. So I used a little piece of a sugar cane to scoot it off and then it jumped up and fluttered a bit and flew over my head. At first I was worried it had gone inside again since I left the door open, but it landed on the brick of the building above the door. The noise it made as it jumped was pretty cool too, it's probably the noise you hear all grasshoppers make, but it was just louder and seemed really strong. I could hear it latch onto the brick wall as it landed too. So cool!

Really big grasshopper. Longer than my middle finger!

He's looking at me!!!

One day, I was outside walking back to the hostel and there were a bunch of young kids outside and they were saying 'nfundo' or something like that. Moi, who speaks english quite well told me that it means 'picture'. So I hurried inside to get my camera so that we could have some fun taking pictures. I took a bunch of pictures of them and would show them the picture and they would start laughing and pointing at the picture. It was funny. Then I crouched down to try and get in a picture with them. They weren't understanding the fact that it would take a picture of us. So one of the kids stood in front of the camera to see what I was pointing at after looking where I was looking, and that's when I took the picture. It was pretty funny! Then I tried to motion to them to come by me and then they would be in the picture after I showed them what happened in the last picture. They caught on pretty fast and we were successful!

We're working on it...

Success!