As most people know, I am not very good at
"roughing it." I have never really been camping and my school camp
experience is limited to weekends and trips to Catalina, etc. Thus, this is a
whole new experience for me and I am proud to say that I'm doing pretty well.
The compound consists of a "guest house" where the volunteers stay.
It is about 10 rooms with a common room. I have one roommate, a 19-year-old
girl named Nanja from Germany, that arrived the same day as me. My room
consists of 2 desks, 2 metal sheds with shelves for closet space, a bathroom
with a "western" toilet, and a shower area that is a tiled floor with
a faucet and two buckets. I'm getting used to the bucket shower experience, and
don’t really mind taking showers in the dark and without hot water. The guesthouse
also has a large TV with cable! That’s a new development and it comes in handy
when I just want to relax. India TV is basically American TV so the other day I
watched Friends, Fabulous Cakes, and the movie “Get Smart.” I also brought some
DVDs with me of my favorite TV shows (Big Bang Theory, Warehouse 13, and
Castle). The mattress in my bedroom is proving to be one of the most difficult
things to get used to. It is so hard that I wake up multiple times in the night
because different parts of my body have fallen asleep. I also always have to
shift positions because of pain. Thus, since I have to be up at 6am everyday, I
don’t get much sleep. There are also geckos living in our room… actually there
are geckos everywhere in the guesthouse. The other day all the volunteers were
watching TV and spent a good amount of time watching 2 geckos try to catch a
dragonfly in the room. So far and thankfully I haven’t had any other creatures
in my room…but there is a spider outside my room that is probably 5 inches
long. :( Oh well, when I signed up for India I knew there would be bugs!
