Living In Community...Part III

The summer passed and as August came around, it became very clear that we were getting on the family's nerves that we lived with and visa versa. So, we really began praying about a place to live. Miraculously, Curt and our friend went out to some villages about 3 hours away to look for houses to rent. Once in the main village, which was like a center for the surrounding ones, Curt and our friend, S, began looking for a house for rent. This is next to impossible. You need to ask around and find out if people know which houses are for rent. There aren't signs or anything. Then you need to track down the owners. So, after an afternoon of searching, they didn't find anything. I was praying and praying. We needed to get out to the villages for language an culture learning and I felt like time was just slipping away. S decided to visit some relatives of hers and ask around. Her niece, A, said, "Well, I don't know of any houses. I guess you can rent mine." She had a house in a nearby village that was empty. So, they took off to look at it. It needed A LOT of work. Yikes. The walls are plastered with mud and most of it was falling off. Windows broken. Needed a new wood burning stove, which is a major project. And on and on and on. But we needed a place and she offered it for a whopping $40/month. Everyone said we were getting ripped off. We'll take it.
We moved in that week. We showed up and A's dad was drunk and knocking the mud off the walls with a crowbar. We dragged in two, huge hardside suitcases, a laptop bag, two packed full-size hiking bags and some odds and ends. It pretty much filled the room we were given for a bedroom. There was no food in the house so we had cookies and tea for dinner. There were no sheets on the beds so we slept in our sleeping bags. The window was broken and had no covering. And, of course, there are no doors so where we slept was open to the whole house. This, for them, is very normal and not weird at all. We had to adjust to sleeping in the same place with A and her dad. We crawled in our sleeping bags that night and I thought, "What have we done?". I was in the middle of nowhere, 3 hours from the nearest city, we don't speak the language, there was no food in the house and I had no idea where to buy any and I didn't know a single soul. The gravity of being so far away from anything familar weighed on me and I lay there for a long time...until someone knocked on our door and then our window when we didn't get up to get it. The night just got longer....