Days like this I get really homesick. Not due to the reasons you might think, like it is almost Christmas and I know my little brother is done with finals so come this weekend my whole family will be at home. And I won’t be there. Because I am here. For twenty more months or so, not that I am counting down. Nor is it because the weather is nice and wintery in northern California, raining and “freezing” by my temperate Californian perspective and I just sweat through my shirt while giving a test in our concrete school buildings with no fans and tin roofs.
No, these things are there everyday. I can adjust to the constant knowledge that life goes on without me on the other side of the world. I miss my family and friends every day, every season, but that I can deal with because it’s a constant.
What gets to me is walking into the bathroom and seeing that the cistern is refilled and I can’t see the tiled bottom even though there is only about a foot and a half of water in it. The water has a murky greenish tint, and has various crap floating in it. What is the point of even bathing? Not to mention that that is basically the same water that I drink. Yes, I bleach and filter it first but YUCK.
Even better is walking “into” the “kitchen”, by which I mean walking outside behind the house, and hearing something moving around in water. There are so many water holding containers it took me a minute to find the source. Then I saw the bucket with the colander on top, probably to keep the stray cats out. I tried to peer in but all I saw was a brownish scaly surface. On the off chance that it was a snake I decided not to investigate further, but to play it cool. “Oh sure,” my attitude clearly conveyed, “there are always buckets of live animals and liquid in my kitchen.” Then it moved when I was standing right next to the bucket making my easy mac n’ cheese (thanks Alida!). I jumped back and laughed nervously. “Fish,” my host sister said. At least it wasn’t a snake.
I sat down with my noodles to stir in the cheese powder (screw organics! I love me some powdered cheese product) when my little 2-year old host brother walks into the kitchen, squats, and pees on the floor. In America if you find a puddle of piss and a live aqueous creature in your kitchen you assume your roommate had some sort of mental break down or had a super wild night last night. But no, this kind of stuff is supposed to just be my life now. I try to appear calm and worldly, but I would really rather not have urine in my kitchen. I just don’t like it.
At dinner I discovered the fish were catfish, or something that looked like it. I have told my host family that I do not eat fish, because even though I have been eating meat for a few months now, I still cannot pull apart a creature with its eyeballs still in its head and eat it. So at least on that front I was safe.
Then there were the chopped bits of something resembling poultry. My host mom set down a bowl of meat pieces with bones and everything still in there and was clearly excited about it. I tried to identify a safe, bone free piece, but I couldn’t. So I just hoped no one would notice that I didn’t eat it. I no longer had to wonder what it was when my host sister put the goose head on the cutting board and started chopping up its neck. The slender, graceful neck and the perfectly rounded bill laid there, evidence of some sort of intelligent design, or at least leaving no one to wonder why there is a famous ballet called Swan Lake. The goose/swan was beautiful. The only problem was that the whole thing had a reddish sauce on it and, of course, it wasn’t attached to a body because that was in pieces in the bowl in front of me.
Don’t get me wrong, I know how much worse I could have it. But sometimes I can’t help but ask, “Really? What was I thinking?” Then I find a student’s paper tucked among the 150 who have no idea what is going on, with a fairly coherent paragraph, or at least sentence, on it. I remember why I’m here, and why I stay. Plus, it can’t hurt my law school applications…
But for now I will be sustained on sweet sweet memories of indoor plumbing, not being woken up my dogs in the middle of the night (though frat boys weren’t exactly delightful either), and a vegetarian diet. Happy holidays everyone!!!
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