During the 70’s, there was a genre of movies called disaster films. Buildings caught on fire, boats sank, and other bad stuff happened. When they started to run out of ideas, they had several movies about killer bees attacking people.

In the last week, you can walk twenty yards from our home and hear a huge buzzing. It is huge swarms of bees, and it is the eeriest sound I can think of. If Ernest Borgnaine shows up, I’m on the first plane out of here.

Fred was explaining to me how he washes his clothing. His village has a well, and he draws up to 25 buckets of water up by hand. He then hand washes his clothing with soap, and then rinses it in clear water. He then hangs them in a place where he can watch them, because clothes get stolen easily. The whole process can take most of a day. And this is someone who walks almost ninety minutes to and from work everyday, and has to tend his garden on the weekend.

We had our mid term break from Friday until Tuesday. Here is a schedule of one of the kids to get home:

3:45 AM – Bus leaves RVA
6:30 AM – Two hour flight
10:00 AM – Clear security
10:30-4:30 PM – Drive home (the last two hours, the roads are so bad they can only go 15 miles per hour)

Three days later: reverse and repeat.

One of the mothers explained to me that her husband was the only doctor for a town of over one hundred thousand people. If he leaves, they know a certain amount of people will die from lack of care. There are no English schools in their area, so that explains why an RVA exists. The sacrifice some of these people make is so beyond me.

But, like many things in life, it is the small things that I connect the most with. One of the guys in our dorm had a bucket of candy that he had bought, and I asked him if he was gonna gorge himself on the long trip home. He told me that the candy was for his sister; they didn’t have candy where his family worked, and he knew she would enjoy it. He had saved all his spending money for the term to buy her candy.

I have two lovely sisters that I never did anything nice for at that age. It’s part of the reason that this place can grow on you; being around people who have sacrificed for the cause, in big ways and little ways, is the most intoxicating thing I know of.

Your pal,
Steve