Day 55 - Tired

I’m so tired right now and my head hurts. We just got done with dinner and now I’m siting on my bed (bottom bunk) with my back against the wall where my head would normally be. I took a shower today for the first time in 3 days, I know, pretty gross. The worst thing happened last night after coming home from a hard days work. It was 11:30 p.m. when I finally got around to getting in the shower. The 25 gallon water heater that we have here was all heated up and I was so excited because I knew I was SO dirty. I hopped in the tub and proceeded to spin both the hot and cold water nozzles. To my dismay, nothing but a tiny trickle made it out of the faucet, only enough to fill a cup... we had no water. I was hunched down at the time and my head just fell to the side and rested on the wall. My eyes closed and I wanted to cry... OK, not really, but pretty close. I was so excited to take a shower and get into bed all clean. While sulking I managed to get a small amount of water out of the faucet, left over in the hot water tank. With this water I washed my feet and up to my knees as well as my face. It was the least I could do before getting into bed.

Dinner tonight was pretty basic, just as basic as the last 47 days or so. Beans, cabbage, potatoes, pineapple, and passion fruit juice. Funny thing is, I’m not sick of it. She does pretty good at switching things up which helps out. I’m content to eat the same food for another 28 days, no problem. I’m happy to say that I’ve only been sick (in my stomach) once or twice while being here, not too bad! I thought for sure I was going to be spending 50% of my time in the restroom, luckily, that has NOT been the case. Irene, our cook, went to culinary school and does a very good job at keeping things clean when she cooks for us. She is a very classy lady, very nice. I’m going to miss her.

We went back to Little Angels Primary School today to fill the foundation that we built on Tuesday. There were only 6 of us in the beginning which shrunk down to 4 by the end. It took a little longer with fewer people but we got the job done. It’s always nice to have a lot of people there to help mix the adobe mixture which is probably the most annoying and difficult thing in the whole stove making process. We had just enough clay for the stove... well, kinda of. We have noticed a trend as we have been building these stoves. We never have enough clay. No matter how much we ask that the people provide us, they never get enough and it’s a little frustrating. So, we’ve had to improvise just a little bit. We decided that in certain parts of the stove where having the adobe mixture present isn’t critical, that we can use bricks to fill in space thus reducing the amount of clay we need. We have done this with all of the stoves now and it has worked greatly to our advantage. Today was just the same. We used bricks where we could and then we filled the rest with the adobe mixture. So, in theory we had enough and it worked out. We will return in 3 weeks to put a nice top layer of cement to provide a nice cooking surface.