Maybe I'll Stay Forever...: Papaya seeds and Charcoal

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!)

Just enjoying my time here and getting to see another temple on the edge of a lake.

UNO!

Grinding the husks off the coffee. (btw, I am very tall in this culture, however she is also very short :)

Next comes sifting. We tried it, but it was better left to those with experience.

Then you pull out any coffee beans still in their husks to be ground again.

And you sift again.

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 :)

My host with the papaya.