The New Normal: Part 1

After spending a week in our training village of Epau, we've become accustomed to the no-frills lifestyle. Of course, I came into this experience expecting such. However, if you were to have told me that I (or my fellow trainees) would experience any of the following while living here, I would have cringed or laughed.

But being here, seeing/hearing/feeling these things every day, it's no big deal. It's the new normal.

• chickens roaming in and out of the classroom, as benign as a fly buzzing around
• answering everyone, including children, host family members, and complete strangers who ask the question "where are you going?" not because they are nosy, but because it's just something you ask of people who you run into on the street
• using a headlamp to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and watching three cockroaches scurry from the seat upon entering the stall
• children never wearing shoes, whether it be in church, on the rocky beach, the road, the rocky path to the nearby cave...
• turning a blind eye to a few tiny ants crawling around in your bowl of freshly-peeled taro
• children (sometimes under the age of 6) carrying around 2-foot long bush knives, sometimes larger than their arms
• this conversation:
• Me: "You missed it, there's a bat flying around in here. A flying fox, to be specific."
  Tristan: *shrugs* "Oh, that's not scary. They can't carry rabies."

More to come in future posts.