Hurry up and Wait

So, the next day after we arrived, I had my birthday in Cote d’Ivoire. They sang to me in English and French. In the evening, we went on a spontaneous walk with the visiting pastor Simon and had a blast just walking around and seeing the night life and talking to our hosts and joking around. They bought us orange fanta, a treat, and we greeted all the locals. The pastor kept telling us to slow down our pace as we would get ahead of him. He said that in Africa “Time is not money!” and it is so true. The next day, we went into the nearest city, Bouake, to get a cake for me and my teammate Jess, whose birthday was that day. We all split different slices and then went to a large grocery store for supplies since there’s limited resources in our village. We could not find wifi, which was a bummer, especially since we have assignments for the World Race weekly that require internet and I have treasurer duties for my team that I can’t upload. But, on the other hand, it’s nice to have a forced break from internet/ communication as it’s easier to adapt here and be present in the moment.

My teammate Jess and I volunteered to go with Simon to another village to visit a pastor there and see where the World Race team from last year helped build a church/ clean out the school. It was an adventure for sure; we called it the “day that never ends.” Africa time, remember? So, first we sit in a hot “taxi” aka van for 45 min or so by ourselves while others wait outside and then we are moved to a different van after all that and we are crammed in the backseat with little airflow. We drive for around an hour and then get out and meet the pastor and pray over a woman with a breast infection/ growth and then hop on mopeds (we each were sandwiched in the middle on 2 separate mopeds) and we journey to the pastor’s house and meet his family. Then we finally get to the village, stopping for security checkpoints on the way. We are greeted and they have to “exchange the news” in a hut while we wait and then shakes hands multiple times. We then go to meet more people and sit down (everywhere we go, we are told to sit down on chairs/ benches because it’s rude to talk/ greet each other while standing up and they always make sure as the honored guests, that we sit down). We then see the church they built, which is a large hut of branches with benches underneath. Then we see the school building, outdoor classroom, and bathrooms (and we used the squatty potties there, gonna have to perfect that technique!) All the while, we are trailed by all the village children, who are competing with each other to hold our hands and sometimes individual fingers. One baby got poop on my friend’s dress 😉

We are then ushered to meet the chief of the village as we can’t leave till he meets us. We meet him and he sits on a low hammock and then we are promised a cold drink (which sounds good right about now since we missed lunch and are parched) but alas, they are out of the drink. So, we return to the initial hut and exchange greetings again and wait to leave. We leave on the mopeds and then get a “taxi” back and there were 5 people in the middle row and 3 in the front two seats at one point, crammed in like sardines. The “taxi” stops at one point and the car won’t start and we thought it was the end (Jesus was trying to teach us something, we’re sure) but the driver was able to fix it pretty quickly. Later, the taxi driver stops to argue with the security people who are charging him a fee to pass and as we wait in the hot vehicle, we watch a guard roasting a large rat over the fire. At this point, it almost seems appetizing. We finally make it home and Simon tells us that our other members are at church so we go straight to church from there and have to sit through a service. I was really sure he’d preach on Jesus as the living water at this point, because I surely needed a tall drink of water!

So I’m learning to just go with it and not to stress when things don’t go as you’d like or as you’d planned. But, I’m definitely a work in progress. We drink so much more water than them normally and we aren’t used to being in the heat all day so that’s been hard as they provide us bottled water but we go through it rapidly. Simon’s solution to the heat is to take “3 baths a day” but he doesn’t understand that that won’t rehydrate you and we have limited water for toilets/ bathing as it is. We did our laundry by hand in basins as the local women shook their heads at us because we couldn’t even correctly wring out the clothes, let alone wash them. I’m more appreciative for things in the US I typically take for granted: washer/ dryer, dish washer, running water/ plumbing, showers, and the ability to wash your hands thoroughly whenever you want (hand sanitizer only goes so far…) But, all in all, we are doing well and enjoying bonding with the locals and our hosts, who take care of us so well.