Monday, August 29, 2011

Rainy Season!

Rainy season has finally arrived! Rainy season is also cultivation season. The rain came late this year and has not been as abundant as normal, so villagers have been worrying over drought and famine. The rains finally started to come, but in strange sporadic storms and not a steady rain. Each day before and after a rain storm, it is extremely hot. I guess its nature making us suffer before we’ll be given some rain! Every single villager is in the fields cultivating- the older people and the small children too. My village is like a ghost town. There are no sick people at the health center. It’s not because they’re all healthy. Even if you’re sick, you still need to help the family out in the fields to cultivate. So, people will not come to the CSPS this time of year unless they are deathly ill. Normally, I’m never alone in my courtyard. But now with everyone busy in the fields, I’ve had so much quiet time. I read 3 and a half novels in one week at site. Sometimes the lack of privacy is frustrating, but now that I have no visitors, I realize that I’d much rather have twenty people in my courtyard than none.
I had always assumed I would just know what to do in case of an emergency, like the correct reaction or answer would come to me naturally when I needed it. I recently learned that my adrenaline does not kick in like in the movies. I actually tend to freeze up, freak out, not react for a few minutes, finally react, and then later on realize a better way I could have handled the situation. Some recent examples…
Wind storms come with rainy season. Mortifyingly and involuntarily, I bared it all in village. I was in my shower area taking a bucket bath and a strong gust of wind blew away my pagne (what I was using as a towel)! My courtyard is located along a main road and I have lots of neighbors. I immediately panicked and froze in the shower. I was peaking over my shower wall checking to see if anyone was around. I had to wait about 5 minutes until the coast was clear, then I made a run for it! I slouched down and ran out of my courtyard into the millet field (too bad the millet hadn’t been planted yet so it was an open field) and grabbed my pagne and ran back. I called my friend Kate to tell her my horror story later and she said “Why didn’t you just run into your house instead of out into the open?” Well, that would have been great…had I thought of it myself.
I was cooking in my mud hut kitchen and all of a sudden my camp range stove top blew up in flames. There was a huge fire coming out from under the stove and it was rising up towards my straw ceiling. I didn’t even take a step back; I literally just froze in place and couldn’t move. In my head I was thinking “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” my lack of reaction resulted in the arm hair on both of my arms being singed off by the flames. The smell of burnt hair triggered a reaction from me, but it wasn’t a good reaction. I wanted to put out the fire and all I could think to do was blow on it, so I started blowing on the giant flame as if I could put it out like a candle. Well, of course that didn’t work. So then I started thinking about how I could get water to put it out. Finally, I realized, I could simply turn off the gas seeing as it is a gas camping stove. Once I did this, the fire stopped. I would think I would have learned my lesson…apparently not. The same thing happened the next day and I froze up again for a few minutes. I think I need to work on my reaction time…

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