Tuesday, October 8, Pro Vita

Today we started cleaning the two top floors of the house we are finishing.  And I mean cleaned: cobwebs, dead bugs, sawdust, construction debris, yuch!  We got the  windows washed, floors swept, vacuumed and mopped, walls cleaned, and some curtains hung.  We moved bed frames into each room and cleaned them. By we I mean the women.  The men were busy making sawdust and construction debris.  But it was well choreographed and we stayed out of each others way pretty well.  

After lunch three of us walked to the "other" village, Starchiojd, a little larger, farther, and in the opposite direction of "our" village.  We had a shopping list with something for everyone.  But nobody spoke English and we had to pantomime flat sink stopper, acidophilus yoghurt, and ribbon, in every store in town because each is a little general store that could conceivably have any of them,  so it turned into quite an experience.  In a town where we couldn't even find oranges, it was no surprise we couldn't find the yoghurt.

We call this the strip mall, four shops selling similar miscellany

Shrine, not church

Public library

It was a photo safari too. We stopped for cows and sheep and many horses and wagons. Turns out the latter, which we thought was a quaint throwback is really a common means of transportation.   We walked along a two lane paved road with no shoulder and had to watch every step sharing the road with so much livestock.  While we were out, Charlie had a chance to spend some time with the kids and did some magic tricks.  Apparently it was a big success.

Local transport

We made it back in time to supervise the little kids while their mothers watched a movie -- "What to Expect When You're Expecting" -- hardly the choice I would have made for teen mothers.  But I was in heaven playing with a seven month old, so why complain.  Charlie and the other two guys walked up the hill to see the the rest of our village.  The town has what we thought were several churches. We've discovered most of the little churches we see are actually shrines. 

Denis with one of his dozens of caregivers

Our charges

After dinner we had a little sewing circle and finished hemming all the curtains made thus far.  One of the volunteers made dinner so we thought we escaped the cabbage but they set out a bowl of slaw leftover from lunch.

Mostly seamstresses, a few kibitzers

We really are having fun.  The group is smart, funny, and interesting, and really of like mind in so many ways.  It makes it easy to overlook a shower that floods the bathroom every day and a washing machine in the kitchen that floods each time it's run.

12,321 steps.  (5.2 miles)