Water Woes

There's no water this week. It's all turned to ice and I've turned into a grouch. Yesterday I was desperate to flush the toilet so I tried to fill it up with the only water we had: purified bottled water.

I quickly realized how absurd this situation would appear to someone looking in from the outside. I am trying to flush a toilet with bottled water. In the end, it didn't even work. I walked back into the only warm room in the house and slammed the door. I'm a Westerner and I don't possess even an ounce of finesse in the third world day-to-day tasks.

"Aaron, seriously, I gotta get out of here!" I squawk dramatically as I smear baby powder on my hair. I'm trying to keep my hair looking presentable since I haven't had a shower in 5 days. The girls will laugh at my unruly tangles and matted rats nests. It's like I'm back at Mother's Day Out again. "Only three weeks, love." Aaron reminds me. I keep waking up in middle of the night thinking that we aren't ever leaving. Perhaps it's my brain's way of coping.

I made an excellent fire yesterday and cuddled up on my palate with a good book. The fire felt so good, but I knew that it would have its vengeance shortly after I reaped the benefits. Sure enough, I'm still coughing and blowing my nose since I built that dad-gum fire. There are so many things to contend with here. I imagine that Afghans get over complaining very quickly. Mazar is one of the most extreme valleys in the world, temperature-wise (according to the internet). It's 15 degrees in the winter and 120 degrees in the summer. Being comfortable is rare.

The girls I teach at school have such good attitudes about living life here. I garner a lot of my strength from them. They always rush to turn the lights on in the classroom before I can get to them. They refuse to walk through a door until I am safely through. If I drop something, they race to pick it up. I rarely hear them complain about being too cold or too tired. Before I came here, I felt so sorry for these women because I assumed that their lives were, for the most part, terrible. It lifts my spirits daily to see girls smiling up at me (they love to stare when I'm not looking). I love listening to their jokes and watching them laugh and have fun.

Many Afghans have known struggle and discomfort for their entire lives, but it doesn't make them all bitter or unhappy. It's quite the opposite. Their struggles go beyond a poor man's woes as well; they've lived and breathed war and human loss. I would imagine that it's a small thing when the water runs out or the electricity shuts off for the day. 

As for me, I'm about to go home to a place where clean water is plentiful. Even the poorest of the poor have access to a hot meal and a shower. The gap between these two places is so wide that I don't even know how to wrap my mind around it. It rips at the seams of my neat, little western worldview. Some of us are just so damn lucky. There I said it. It's all I can do to make sense of why I've been given so much.

God is good to me and He is good to Afghans; I know this. They are rich in ways that I cannot fathom, but its hard not to wonder why I get off so easy while so many others don't. I needed to see this way of life in order to challenge my own pathetic wastefulness and ungratefulness. I think I'll go take a cold sponge bath and make a memory of this. I may not ever have the fortune of being so unfortunate again.