No Expectations

It’s best to not have any expectations here. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Why? Because if you do have expectations, you’ll definitely have to adjust them, otherwise you’ll just be disappointed. Case in point: Saturday. We packed our bags with all of our dead electronics to be charged and our dirty sheets and towels to be washed. With such heavy bags, we decided that we might as well get a ride to Rulenge rather than walk, however the one piki piki driver in the village wasn’t around. First failed expectation. So we walked. Then I just readjusted and expected nothing to go right, since we were now an hour and a half behind schedule when we got to town at 12:00. We bought our food for the week from the market, and since we still couldn’t find a piki driver we knew to return our food to our house, we ended up calling someone else to take our things. At least that worked out. But then, there were no taxi’s around leaving for Ngara. Great…since we needed to get our sheets to Ngara in time for them to be washed, especially after carrying them all this way! After 45 minutes, a taxi showed up and we piled in with too many other people, were hassled for our phone numbers by two different men in the process, and headed off for Ngara. When we finally made it there, we paid for piki rides to the other volunteer’s house, where the woman was waiting for our sheets. Phew. We made it in time! By now, it was 2:30pm, and we really needed to get to the internet café in time before it closed at 4:00 since that’s really the only reliable access to internet all week. So we pikied back to town and had a good amount of time online, and by the time we finished we could finally breath that things seemed work out today. We walked back to Sue’s house, stopping for a mango juice and small bag of popcorn at the gas station when we realized we hadn’t eaten all day. We got back to her house, and while the electricity wasn’t on yet, we at least had clean sheets waiting for us! We prepared a lovely dinner of spaghetti, tomato sauce and fried eggplant as we waited for the lights to come on…but as we were eating by candlelight, the news came that electricity wouldn’t be on until at least Monday. WHAT? This is certainly unexpected. Since my phone is beeping low battery, my computer is dead, my ipod is dead, and my kindle is on the verge of death…we certainly cannot go all week without charging any of this because that would just mean a realllyyyy long week. But there’s no where else to charge! AHHHH. This is the point where even laughing about it becomes difficult. But it was completely out of our control, so might as well just sleep it off. When we woke up on Sunday, Marisa had the brilliant idea of checking into a local hotel for the day to recharge everything. While not ideal to have to pay for a room, it is definitely worth our sanity this week. And I suppose we can afford $8 total for a room…so that’s that. Things have all seemed to work out for us, and while not ideal, life will certainly go on. Appreciating the little things has taken on a whole new meaning here! And you should be thankful too, because without spending the afternoon at this hotel, you would have had no blog updates this week!