time to be real.

What up everyone. I said to myself that I would only post when I am feeling cheery but I haven´t posted in a while so whatever. I´ll try to keep it fun anyway.

So I am ticked with blogger because I haven´t been able to upload any pics since my first time. Instead, since this is my grumpy entry, I am just going to describe some of the luxuries we have in daily life in Nicarauga.

Our toilet. It is a green metal latrine house the size of a phone booth, 20 yards outside our house. it has a plastic toilet seat with a plastic lid that goes overtop to keep critters from going down the deep dark disgusting hole. Its like 12 feet deep and stinks as badly as you would expect. Its only about 5 foot 10 inside and I have to stand like a hunch back in there. The inside is littered with spider webs and the only thing that keeps me from worrying that something is going to come up and bite me in the but is that I am religious about closeing the lid every time. I do have to say there are some really cool parts about having a latrine. Number one cool thing: It will never clog up and I never have to plunge it. This is so cool for me because I have the rare talent of finding a way to clog any toilet you can throw at me. Number two cool thing: If you have a really nasty stinky one, no big deal. It already stinks and is totally open air with huge gaps in the metal walls at the top and bottom so it airs out with one gust of wind. Number three cool thing: you don´t have to flush. I don´t know why this is cool, but I kind of like it. Although every time I leave I feel like I am forgetting something.

Shower. Our shower is an adobe shack attached to our house. It was orginally intended to be a kitched with a wood burning stove, but we don´t need to cook for ourselves (so awesome!) so we use it as a shower so we don´t have to give a show to the whole village when we bathe. The ¨shower¨is a large plastic barrel with probably 15 gallons of water sitting on the floor. Another component is a medium sized plastic bowl which is used to scoop ¨clean¨water from the barrel and dump over one´s head. After the initial wetting down I then dampen my shower puff thingy and then get it all soapy and lather my self up. I complete the cylce with more bowls full of ¨clean¨water dumped onto myself. This method of bathing reminds me much of washing my car back home. Its not all that bad. The water feels freezing cold in the scourching hot nicaragua weather, but I found that if i shower in the late afternoon it is amazingly refreshing.

Laundry. our laundry machine is a bumpy rock sitting on a stack of old tractor tires. Much like showering, we have a big barrel of ¨clean¨water and some medium sized bowls for scooping water with. i think I hate this more than any of the others. It takes forever to wash clothes. We also let ourselves get way behind because we avoided doing laundry for the first two weeks. So now we have a mountain and it takes like an hour and a half to do a small load. The good news is that Jenny has created her own system for doing the laundry, which consists of a soak period, some scrubing and soaping up, then a series of rinses. It works pretty good and she has gotten good at it with little practice. I help by being the rinser, ringer outter, and hanger while she soaks and scrubs. Even though Jenny does the hard work I still hate doing it. I want to take up one of the locals on their offer to do our laundry for pay, but there is just something weird about having a stranger wash your dirty underwear. I am so lucky to have lovely Jenny here to help me out.

I have to go cause my cafe time is racking up at 2 hours. I´ll post more about our little joys of daily life later.