Sounds like a yummy mix right?
Well for me these have been my recent staples :) Well, sort
of. I have them both in my diet right now because apparently they are natural
ways to deal with whatever decided to invade my stomach. Thankfully I’ve just
finished day 4 of 5 on the yucky ground up papaya seeds and there isn’t too
much charcoal left either.
Last week I had a really special privilege of doing a home
stay with a local family along with another young lady from the US, two young
worker’s daughters and 3 Indonesians that are a part of the mobility team here.
I was excited to see the mobility team in action and be a part of giving
strollers to 2 young kids that couldn’t walk and also doing a fun lesson for
some kids in a village with one the ladies on the team. I also got to see the
most recently completed water project that has brought clean water to a village
that a few months ago had no running water at all!!!
These are some pics of some of the people the mobility team
helped and the kids we taught (sorry, no pics of the water project).
Now let me tell you a little bit about my home stay. The
people we stayed with are a couple that is a part of the mobility team who live
close to where many of the patients live, about 2.5 hours from where I have
been staying. They were gracious hosts excited to have all of us come stay with
them, even thought there were SEVEN of us :) For their area they are pretty
well off actually and their house had many modern conveniences. Now I’m sorry I
didn’t take many pictures of the house and the area they lived in, I’m sure it
would’ve been very interesting coming from an American perspective, but I’ll
just use old fashioned words and trust your vivid imaginations.
-To get to the house we had to park on the side of the road
and walk on a path to their house. The walk to the house was downhill and back
to the car was uphill so it took us 15 minutes to walk with our stuff down to
the house and 25 min to walk back (this is where packing lightly is KEY). The
path was actually VERY nice, though I might not have said so at first. It was
cement the whole way BUT the cement path was only 2 feet wide. Now for walking
there wasn’t a problem and many people rode their motorbikes on it, which was
why it was cement, but I just thought it was so different that people would put
in all that effort to cement it, but only make it wide enough for a motorbike!
And it won’t ever become a road!!! I guess I’m still very Western in my
thinking. (Now maybe you’re thinking “Oh, that’s nice, a beautiful path in the
woods where you can walk and see down into some beautiful valleys and get
glimpses of the sea and the sunset over the sea” which is all SO true but
imaging walking 40 minutes at least just to get a little thing from the store!
Or just to get to your car to drive another 30 minutes to get to the big
market!...)
-When we arrived at the house I was so pumped about all
their modern convinces. They had doors, rather than blankets in the doorways!
And walls around the rooms and living space!
They had drinkable water!
They had beds for us to sleep on!
They had a kitchen and bathroom with water!
They had a Western toilet (if there’s any confusion here,
there are other options than the model you currently have at your house, namely
the “squatty” and you can use your imagination here).
So we were living an elite kind of life here.
Through my American eyes though, I saw something that looked
a lot different. I saw that all the walls were unpainted cinder block, the
kitchen was unattached downhill from the rest of the house, the water that is
in the bathroom and kitchen just is a faucet that is connected to big storage
tanks and there are no sinks to be found anywhere (they are replaced by
handheld little buckets). Also I noticed that there is no way to warm up or
cool of this house and there is no water that runs to the toilet (yet again
this is where the small buckets come in handy). It’s funny how the two
perspectives are so different. I could go on, but I don’t want you to get a
negative idea of my stay or think that I am just being sarcastic. After being
in those villages every day we came home with the “little” we had, I felt so
overly blessed and like we were living in abundance! Life here is just so
different.
On our last day at our friend’s
beautiful house we had a fun day. The mobility team knows our hosts very well
and have stayed there many times, so it was a lot like they had come home.
Everyone pitched in on the chores and loved just hanging out and being
together—whether it was watching TV, or talking over coffee, or playing UNO.
The jobs that they helped out with were things like cooking the meals, watching
the dishes, feeding the animals or even cleaning the animals poo :). On our
last day there we were involved with getting coffee ready to sell. Our hosts
basically have a small plantation where they have goats and chickens and grow
coffee and cloves. We had a chance to help pick a little coffee earlier in the
week but on our last day we took coffee that had been drying for 10 days and
got the outer husks off by grinding it with a big stick, sifted the beans to
separate out the beans from the husks and bagged the green coffee beans. It was
fun for us, but certainly alone it would have been exhausting work. Here are
some pics of that. (Fun fact: There is a need for fair trade coffee because
women like those we worked with in these pictures work hard and get paid $2 at
the most for 1 kilogram (2.2lbs) of coffee!)
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| Just enjoying my time here and getting to see another temple on the edge of a lake. |
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| UNO! |
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| Grinding the husks off the coffee. (btw, I am very tall in this culture, however she is also very short :) |
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| Next comes sifting. We tried it, but it was better left to those with experience. |
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| Then you pull out any coffee beans still in their husks to be ground again. |
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| And you sift again. |
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| Finally it's ready to go home and eventually sold. (Everyone got a kick out of us carrying the big things of coffee on our heads. Very typical for them, a neck ache for us!) |
So to get back to the papaya seeds
and charcoal… Although I enjoyed my exciting and exhausting cultural experience
on the first night, my stomach decided it was not going to be a part of the fun
and starting then, until today even, it’s been a little bit off. I’m not sure
what it was that I ate or drank, and it could’ve even been something before I
got to my home stay but we’re thinking it’s some kind of parasite or the like that
has decided to take up residence inside my stomach. So when I got back and
continued to feel yucky my host went right out and bought a papaya just for the
purpose of grinding up the seeds for me to drink. Apparently the seeds paralyze
the parasite and then it’s my body’s job to get it out. The charcoal is
something else we added to that. Charcoal comes in swallow-able tablets and it absorbs
the parasites or whatever is in my stomach so that they don’t stay in my
stomach but they move along with the rest of my food. Exciting right! (See
there are just some things you don’t need pictures for). So that’s where these
two things come into play and now you know the go to natural drugs for
parasites :)
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| My host with the papaya. |
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| Somebody didn't want to miss out on the photo op |
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| Seeds and honey coming up! | | | |
Ok
well enough about my new cultural experience for now! Hopefully my next update
will inform you that my regimen worked its magic!
.
