Streaking, pooper-scooping, and other adventures….

As I sat doing my quiet time this morning, I was cognizant of a presence at my window. I should have been, as my desk abuts the window frame, and the little shadow of a face belonging to this presence wasn’t but a couple feet from my own face, which was buried alternatively in my journal and Romans.

It was Night, one of the neighbor girls, testing the feeling of her tongue against my tattered window screen, and earnestly watching the movement of my pen and the bouncing of my somewhat-out-of-control curls as I preformed what she must know as my morning ritual. You might know it as my quiet time.

I’m often baffled at the rapt audience we have in the Lopit people, especially the children.

But, then again, I guess we are a strange lot, and sometimes I even find myself thinking of our mud-house life here as a lot like an episode of Seinfeld.

Take yesterday, for instance. As Kim and I were stirring our coffee in the kitchen, we saw a giant cow—astray from the trail nearby—trot by our kitchen window. Oh, what fun! We both dashed outside, hollering, trying to shoo it around the house, down the craggy path and out our gate. What a spectacle for the Lopit children, already perched on our front-yard rocks, ready for that day’s show. And a show they did get. It wasn’t until a few minutes into this gleeful-yet-frantic cowgirling that I stopped dead in my tracks, realizing I was still in my pajamas—shorts and a tanktop. I might as well have been running around in my skivvies. I yelped and ran back inside, to the tune of the giggling children.

Or take later in the day, when we found ourselves peering down our longdrop toilet, by the light of my headtorch. Pattie accidently shattered our water filter that morning and threw the pieces down the choo. We didn’t realize for a few hours that on that shattered filter was a little plastic piece, necessary to hook up our new filter. A curious situation indeed. Perhaps more curious was the bamboo pole/wire/kitchen cup contraption that we eventually used to pull that precious filter from the depths of that stinky hole. I can’t say our choo has ever echoed with laughter like it did yesterday afternoon, as our two blonde heads bumped and hollered at each other as we balanced that chunk of clay between our two poles and slowly pulled it out, holding our breath—more in concentration than against the smell.

So maybe I should wonder less at the children’s fascination with us, and wonder more at how we make it work out here—three single American women, living in a mud house, on a rather forgotten and remote mountainside in South Sudan.