bug sweeping, squatting and hut swapping

so i have found a new place to live! hooray! after the earwig incident i was left homeless, squatting in the homes of friends. that was a week ago. i still have another week before i can move...

last saturday my australian friend jenny and i went out to clean the earwigs from my hut. when we opened the door, everything was covered in earwig bodies. there were thousands that had been killed by the four bug bombs that i had set off. it was the most bugs i had ever seen in one place in my entire life! we had to sweep a path to walk through so we wouldn't crush them into the cement floor. we took everything out of my hut and put it in the front yard and then started sweeping. by the end, we had a pile of earwigs that resembled a large mound of grossness. my host mom wanted to keep them to show her husband when he got home, so she swept him into a box. it nearly filled the box. jen and my host mom mopped and re-polished the floor with the shoe polish that rubs off on everything and i went through all of my things in the yard, shaking bugs out of it all. since they have pinchers, they sometimes stick to things when they die, so i had to pick off a lot of bug bodies from sheets and clothes. it rocked. after we cleaned, we started to move the furniture back in and i realized that the earwigs were still falling from the ceiling, this time still alive. instantly there were 15 more crawling on my floor. i started stomping in attempt to kill them, and then i swept them out, only to find more had replaced them. it was a game i couldn't win. so i gave up, i moved my stuff back inside, and i left with jen to go get pizza, our reward for the cleaning. i haven't been back since because i don't want to stay there in the dark with the bugs falling from the ceiling. i am afraid.

since then i have had a series of ups and downs as i have been trying to find a new place to stay. i cannot stay in town because peace corps wants us in the community, so some of my coworkers have been helping me to look. i saw some ok places but all of them are much smaller than where i currently stay and none of them are in as beautiful an area. such is life i suppose. yesterday i went to look at a place that my manager joseph used to stay before he got married. it is a small cement room with a tin roof right outside the main home. the room is a normal bedroom size, and there is where i will sleep, cook, bathe, do dishes, laundry, etc. it is much smaller than where i am staying now, so i might have to get rid of some of my furniture, but i am pretty sure that i will not have to deal with it raining earwigs. the room is painted bright blue and has two windows to let in good light. there is a pit toilet in the yard and they also have a water tap in their yard, which makes me life so much easier! and the nicest thing of all is that it has electricity. right now there is only a light that they ran into the hut, but they are going to have someone come and run another extension cord that will have a plug on it so i can plug in things if i need to. i don't have any money left to buy electric things, so i will continue to cook and heat my room with gel and paraffin, but i am going to buy a water kettle to heat water, so that bathing will be much easier. a pensioning couple live in the house and their children are all grown and living elsewhere. they have chickens running around the yard and 4 cows that they keep in a pen. they also grow maize. i think it will be a decent place to stay, and i know my life will be at least a bit easier. it is also half the distance out of town, so now i will only have to travel 10-15km to get to and from work.

in work news, i am currently trying to get a computer lab up and running at our office for the community to use. we are having a guy come in to build customer counters and shelves since the room is quite small and once he is finished we are going to order 10 desktop computers. i have been contacting different people and running around visiting different places to try and get this thing moving and i must admit, it has been quite fun. i am also trying to register OADP for nonprofit status, which is a huge pain in the ass. i just recently found out that we have problems with our constitution but i cannot get the office in pretoria to send me the letter that states all the problems. it will be amazing if this ever gets done!

and that has been my life. the last week and a half have been really hard and i have often thought about going home. my bestest friend dana is getting married this weekend and me being here doing this seems like a really stupid reason to miss that. plus i don't feel super happy and i always feel extremely alone. here's to the last month of lockdown and the future of spending every weekend traveling to see a different friend.