our first two weeks in the tribe: part three

Survival!

That is how much of our time in Maliyali was spent--simply surviving!  For real, everything just takes so long when you don't have conveniences!  That was really okay with us though, because it kept us busy :) 

So, here are some of the things we had to do, just to live there in the tribe.  (When we actually move into the tribe (after our houses are built), things will be different.  This was more like a bush camping trip).

The biggest thing was feeding our families, and everything that goes along with it!  

preparing the food...peeling sweet potatoes and cooking bananas

Chopping firewood!  The people were so sweet to consistently bring us firewood (although we also chopped our own wood, too)  We were sitting on the ground talking one night and we saw our friend Miriam carrying a huge load...so Emily went to help her.  

making the fire...

Emily was a boss at making fires!  She told me her dad taught her everything she knows about making fires...he definitely would have been so proud of her if he saw how many fires she made!

waiting for the food to cook...

And we could finally eat!  We ended up eating in David and Emily's house for almost every meal.  Mealtimes were good team time :) 

Doing dishes...sometimes we had rainwater to wash them in, other times we had to hike to the creek to wash them because the rainwater tank was empty.

Miriam helping us wash the black stuff off of the pot...they use a leaf to scrub it all off and it works pretty well!

Also, we had to wash our laundry by hand...which doesn't actually work very well, by the way :)   Haha!  Our clothes never got too clean!

And our hair :)  The bucket shower that we had at our houses was difficult for Em and I to wash our hair in...it just took too much water.  So when we wanted to wash our hair (which actually wasn't very often, lol!)...we went to the creek.

We frequently went to that creek to get water (when we had no rainwater).  We had a water filter in our house, to filter the creek water.

That silver thing behind Daisy is our water filter.  However, some days it couldn't keep up--we were drinking lots of water!  So on those nights,  we used a hand pump filter to give us more drinking water.  Whew!  Tiring!

 Going to the bathroom.  Ohhhh my.  That's another topic.  The outhouses they made for us were nice and new, but still just a hole in the ground!  With lots of bees swarming around.  Sigh.  It was always an adventure, for sure!

Here's Daisy, headed down to the outhouse to pee :)

The number one survival technique?  Remembering God's truth.  We had a theme for our camping trip...Hebrews 12 "Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus".  It was so important to keep our minds renewed in the Truth...for us and for our kids.  Here, Nathan is sitting down to do a little devotion with the kids.

(I hate for these blogposts to get too long, so I'll stop this one and pick it up later...)