First whole day= no bueno

Today was my first whole day at Rising Star. I woke up feeling good and ready to go but as soon as I stepped outside of my air conditioned room, that changed. The heat here is unlike anything I've ever felt before in my life...it literally sucks the life out of me. I just think about stepping outside and my body starts to sweat. It's tough!

My group spent 5 hours today doing skin screenings on the children at the school. We had to strip them down and make sure they didn't have anything funky going on. The first few were cute...then they started coming in with crazy skin diseases and we had to cut their nails and some of their pubescent smells started to kick in...and then the heat...and our only faucet for drinking water stopped working and then started working again but had dirt in it....At one point another girl and I came back to change clothes because we got some infectious disease on our clothes. We started getting kind of nervous about it all, and then tried to laugh it off as we stripped down naked in the bathroom and scrubbed our arms. It was crazy. And long. Did I mention that the power goes out AT LEAST 10 times a day (wish I was exaggerating). It's not fun at all because it takes the A/C with it! And at one point I wanted to run the other way but then I realized I was half way across the country (I'm just being honest here...nothing about this is glamorous...and most of it is just plain hard).

me outside our hostel this morning

our hostel room

On the positive side, no frogs have jumped out of my toilet (yet) and I haven't seen a spider or a cobra (yet!) The bathrooms and the rooms are fairly clean & I slept like a rock last night! Here's some pictures of our wonderful bathroom:

my beautiful bucket shower

our squatter toilets

I have almost the same sized hands as a 7 year old

My favorite girl so far-Nageeshvari

 

Nageeshvari and her older brother Maldavan (I'm guessing on the spelling...and on the names, let's be honest...)

Tonight we de-liced the kids and de-wormed them with medications. American names are hard for them to remember (kinda like their names are hard for me to remember) so most of the time they just say "Auntie! Auntie!" It's pretty dang cute.

Another positive note came from my mother, she's an amazing woman:

"I often wonder and marvel at the huge blessing of being born to live in America and have the gospel and having strong families with good relationships.  It really brings me to the point of feeling almost overwhelmed and sad at the same time.  Overwhelmed that the greatest treasures of heaven and earth are all around me and sad that so many of my brothers and sisters have difficult lives.  I really feel the responsibility to help others as much as I can and do all I can to show my gratitude for these many blessing by obedience and service.  I need to better in so many ways and realize that when I have a chance to get a focus on all that we enjoy in our daily life.  There's so much that we take for granted every day that so many people would feel like kings and queens if they had them in their life."

And that is why I'm here. I've been given so much in my life, and now it's my time to swallow my pride and selfishness and give back. Tomorrow can only be better, right? Let us pray that it is.

XOXO