So the past couple of days at Hub were, relaxing and a tad exhilarating. I got to see the people I didn’t even realized I missed and then further other relationships as well. I think we’re all starting realizing there are people here who we still don’t know all that well and we really want to; especially that person who seems to be embodied sunshine, who just opens your mind to so many different reasons for being here and to live every minute of it- which I can’t help but love and try to do my best to live by.
Now I’m back with my host family. Back to no internet, no toilets, and no hot water. Yet, walking in yesterday, to my mom and sister washing clothes and collecting corn kernels was so comforting. Do I have any clue as to what my mom’s going to do with a pound of corn kernels... no, (and I have not seen any popcorn), but for some reason it seemed completely normal to me. And twenty minutes later, I sat around 6 women, helping my mom slice some sort of bean that goes in cous cous, and as they talked and talked (gossiped is more like it, I just know it), in this language I still don’t know, I was strangely quite comfortable.
I sometimes find myself thinking how they would feel if they were in my situation- miles away from home and with no idea what is going on- what they would do. How would we treat them? It boggles my mind. So much to the point, I give up and just decide to make faces at Mohamed.
Today after sleeping in- which is getting up at 9 o’clock- I got up and started helping out around the house. I de-podded about 80ish peas, played with my neighbor Mariam (below, she is SO cute!), and then attempted to study in the blazing hot sun. Then, myself and my CBT mates decided to go on a hike. And then after telling my mom, my sister, my aunt, and then our school cook, they all thought I was crazy because it was so hot out, but we went anyway.
This was a hike which Uncle Danny would be proud of. We did about a 3ish hour hike across the river, up ‘mountains’ to some make-shift caves. Then we went all the way around through fields and the two communities after ours. I apologize, but the pictures I will post have nothing on the actual places and things which was saw. We really have been blessed with our CBT site placement, it is so beautiful and around every corner there’s something amazing to see. Plus, the people here are so incredibly nice and welcoming it’s hard not to fall in love with a community such as this.
After this walk, we all went our separate ways because we were all on dinner duty at our houses tonight. My dinner goal: Pizza. So I started the cooking process around 7:15-7:30ish, by having my mom make the bread and soon after I started cutting up my peppers, onions, tomatoes, etc. Now, back in the states I know exactly what to do when making homemade pizza, so I tried to follow that idea. As I cooked I had about 5 pairs of eyes watching me, along with my Uncle’s wife writing down what I was doing. Long story short, I got it all together, threw it in the oven and hoped for the best. Low and behold, it did look like it came out really good when we finally took it out (check out the pictures) and I was very happy with myself. The one downer, and if you know my you’ll know this is one of my pet-peeves, so the pizza didn’t take that long. I’d say it was finished and ready to go once we took it out of the oven. But we didn’t eat for another hour. Um.. hello, pizza should be eaten nice and piping hot. But, by the time we dove into it, it was luke warm. I can’t get upset, I should have taken into account that we eat at 10:30 at night and shouldn’t have started my cooking process so early on in the night, but it is what it is. All in all, out of about the 15 pieces that there were, 2 and a half were left over. I guess I can call that a success. My favorite part was, mid meal, my Uncle asks me if this was American pizza or Italian pizza; I thought about it for a second, and answered, “it’s Zahara pizza.” They all loved that. I apologize, I was going to post a picture of the pizza, but I forgot to upload those pictures from my camera. So next time!!
Next time, due to Mohamed wanting to use an egg for some reason when we were cooking, it’s breakfast pizza. I’ll keep you posted.
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