9-23-11
This morning is our second morning with the kids. We moved into our new living area two days ago. Our hut isn’t made to be a house, I think it was originally a school classroom. There are no bathrooms, showers or kitchen. Just the boys room and the room Erin and I are living in. In the boys room there is a table and benches that we use to eat. There are 4 sets of bunk beds in their room. We were originally told 6 or 7 but we were asked to add another little boy to the family. He is only 5, younger than all the other children but so far he has been pretty easy to manage. The hard part is he doesn’t go to school so we have him 24/7. The rest of the kids go to school only in the morning, so from about 11:30 am on we have the kids. In the morning we are supposed to wake the boys up at 5 or 5:30 am, read them a worship story, sing with them, have them make their beds, sweep the floor, fold their clothes, have breakfast, wash their faces and brush their teeth before school. School starts at 7:30 am. Most of the kids start trickling back home around 11:30 to 11:45 a.m. This afternoon Erin and I are planning on having a cleaning bee with the kids, we are going to have them pull out all their dressers, sort all their clothes and things, wash everything out and put it back neatly beside their beds. We already scrubbed down the tables and benches and got a new table cloth from town so the table is looking better. We want to scrub the mud off the walls in the boys room too. There are a lot of projects to be done. Erin and I want to build a fire place that the kids can sit around, sing and we can use to cook. We also are planning to plant a garden outside our side of the house, plant vegetables and put some flowers right by our door if we can find any flower seeds. Last night we discovered that we are in need of a clothesline as well, Erin and I had our first laundry adventure after the boys went to bed. We discovered the kids clothesline to be covered with little ants… which could potentially mean ants in the pants. Still thinking about how to keep the ants away from the clothesline we are going to make. Our room is still in need of a lot of work. Our bags are just stacked by the walls, taking up way too much room because we don’t have shelves yet to put things on. We don’t have bed frames so our mats are against one side of the room. I’ve realized the best policy in this little house is to just leave the mosquito net on all the time. Bugs still manage to be crawling on my bed even with this policy so I don’t want to explore other options. Last night when I was in bed, close to sleep, I was all the sudden completely awake when I saw the biggest ant I’ve ever seen in my life crawling up the bed beside me. I don’t think ant is really the name for the creature, but it looked like a ginormous ant with a pincher on the front and a behind that stings like a bee. Outside of my mosquito net were unending other noisy moth type animals, beetles, little bugs and cockroaches. I was too worried about letting all those animals in I didn’t know how to get the massive ant out of my bed. I started trying to direct it down my bed with my headlamp, I think the light scared it because it started pinching and stinging the bed. I felt like a caged animal hiding inside my mosquito net trying to get rid of an unwanted creature inside the cage. Mosquito net FAIL! I was so thankful when Erin finally returned from the big house because she knocked off the hefty green beetle attached to my mosquito net with our hammer. Yes, we have a hammer by our beds ready to smash any unwanted visitors. When at all possible we designate the boys to be our bug killers, but when they’re sleeping we fall back on the hammer. The noises here in the jungle are SO loud at night, now I understand why – there are bugs everywhere!
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