Interim--Maddie

Hi! I can't remember the last time I posted, it could be a few weeks ago for all I can remember! =] I really can only remember the last week or so. And just remembering that much is a stretch! Don't even begin to talk to me about two weeks from now, I am just taking it day by day. =]

I just got back from a school trip on Thursday. We each got to choose what trip we wanted to go on our of the fifteen or so choices. I chose to go to Yunnan. Yunnan is a rural, poorer province in China. The trip I was on was a water project. We dug trenches to provide a poor village with water. The trip was a week long.

 Here you can see one of the village women working alongside with us. They are SO STRONG!!!!!!! I would be working for 30 minutes to an hour to get a little section of hard dirt dug up and then this little lady who only comes up to about my shoulder came by, ripping up ground like you couldn't believe! All of these villagers are so strong! I would be digging in my little area when all of a sudden it would seem like there was a parade down the mountain! I would say, "What's going on?" and the reply would always be, "The villagers put us out of work." Five or ten minutes later I would look up and see the villagers making short work of our trenches, and I, too would get the opportunity to join the parade~

These are some of the village kids, they are SO CUTE!!!! They were watching us play catch with a tennis ball I brought. We would wake up, eat noodles for breakfast AGAIN, put on our gloves, grab our hoes, and hike either 1 km up or down the steep mountain. We'd work for about 4 hours digging, laying pipe, or burying pipe. Then we would hike back to the village to eat rice, veggies and about two bites of meat for lunch. After eating, we would have 1 hour to do whatever we wanted, whether we were playing with the kids or sleeping, the teachers didn't care. I played with the kids every day. At first they were really shy, but the end of the second day they were playing with us. After the hour was up, we would hike 1 km the opposite direction we went in the morning and dig for about 5-6 hours. Sometimes the ground was nice and soft, sometimes packed hard, sometimes rocky, and sometimes clay. It didn't matter what the ground was like, the villagers were still faster! We would hike back to the village and spend the better part of an hour trying to get clean with baby wipes. I would dump out a pile of dirt from my shoes, take off my socks, look at my feet and wonder how my feet got a tan! Three baby wipes later, my feet would be mostly back to their normal blinding white-ness. I got a tan, but didn't even realize it until I got in the shower when I got home and it didn't wash off! Anyway, for dinner we would eat rice, veggies, and about two bites of meat. After dinner we would play with the village kids, and when it got too dark to play, they went home and we played cards until it was lights out. We were so exhausted that I didn't even care that I was sleeping on a slat of wood and my sleeping mat didn't do much to make it softer. I didn't even notice that one of my roommates was shouting in her sleep. Then we woke up in the morning and hit repeat.

This is when we went to visit the village school on the last day. It was raining, so we are wearing rain ponchos. I'm in the middle with my hood off because I wanted my hair to get wet. We hadn't showered in a week, so my hair was pretty gross! On my left in the red poncho is Morgan, and on my right is Samantha. The school was pretty small, but they are building a new one. Most of the kids sleep at school.

Here I am unleashing my inner ninja with one of the village kids. The kids that have the red tie around their necks are the ones who go to school. We taught the kids how to play Duck, Duck, Goose and Red Light, Green Light. We had to come up with the Chinese names for the games, though. Duck, Duck, Goose was Ya, Ya, E. The E sounds more like uh, though. It was so much fun! Red Light Green Light was Hong Deng, Lu Deng. The e in Chinese pinyin sounds like uh, the o in Hong is long, and the lu sounds like something strange that I can't even pronounce correctly. It was still a BLAST!!!

On the last evening, there was a dance party with the villagers. We all stood in a huge circle and tried--and failed, for the most part--to do the traditional dance. There were several girls who would copy everything I did, and during an especially difficult dance, I taught them to say 'I love you' in English. I said, "zhong wen wo ying wen shi I. zhong wen ai ying wen shi LOVE. zhong wen ni ying wen shi YOU." I think they understood! So if you are going to tell some Chinese people how to say I love you in English with some very basic Chinese, there you go! That is the pinyin without the tones, so it might be sort of hard. Oh well!