Germs...

I will never look at germs the same. Shaking hands back in the states
is so beautiful, because I know that hands are clean. I mean most
people have washed their hands after using the bathroom, and they use
toilet paper, they basically don't even need to wash their hands! The
culture here requires that every time you see someone that you know you
must shake their hand, and I know they did not wash their hands with
soap, and that they wiped...with their hand! I'm just gonna explain
germ transfer here really quickly for you.

After the kids get really dirty the mom will wash them in a big bowl of
water. She'll wash the poop off the baby's butt, and the poop off the
older child's feet, then she'll take the rice and rinse it in the same
bowl, which she didn't wash out with soap. After wiping baby butt with
her hand, she'll grab the spoon that I'm about to eat with and rinse it
off in the water that she used to clean the rice, in the bowl she used
to clean the kids...super sanitary right? Whenever they make a salad
for me, my family is super awesome and lets the salad stand in bleach
water, and then after that they will rinse it in giardia infested
water. `There will be times when I am walking to the market and a kid
will run up to me and pull his hand out of his pants to shake mine.
Just yesterday these two super cute little girls followed me home and
watched me while I was trying to clean my hut. After a while they asked
if I could wash them, and seeing their completely unclean state, I
simply couldn't resist. I took my liquid body soap (which they had
never seen before) and a bucket of water, and by the time I turned
around they were nakedly ready for their wash. While I was cleaning the
first girl, the second one took a squat right beside the bucket, right
beside me, and took a pee...come on girl, you could have walked 5 feet
away! Talking about showers, my shower has pools all through it, and
these are pools of urine. Everyone in Tchad uses the shower area as a
urinal as well, but when I first got here I didn't really notice the
smell, but now I can be walking 10 feet away and can smell the pee.
It's even worse when I go in to take a shower, because the smell
overwhelms me and I feel like I'm being covered in little particles of
pee. I've been trying to work on my balance because there have been
times when I'm cleaning my feet and lose my balance, only to step in a
puddle of pee...no longer clean feet. But no worries, if I manage to
stay clean in the shower, I will come out to goat poop or something that
I step in...it really doesn't gross me out anymore. Just this last
Sabbath at church I was holding a baby who peed all the way down the
front of me, which was not the first time, but it's okay, because that
stuff dries. The worst though is when there's a really sick baby and
you can hear the rumbles coming, and then the squirts! The mom will
wipe it off with leaves, her hand, her clothes, or whatever is closest,
and then after church she'll walk over and shake my hand. It seems like
no matter what I do, I can't get away from germs. If a fruit, bread, or
vegetables falls on the ground, no worries, they will pick it up and
bring it to me to eat. The same ground that has been walked on by pigs,
chickens, cows, people, poop...there's just no escaping it. Every time
I go to eat, it is the culture to have a bowl and water to rinse hands
in, and every time, without fail, the water in the bowl after I rinse my
hands is brown. There's so much to be grateful for back home. Cheap
soap, running water, clean water, clean hands, just clean stuff.
Everything here is dusty, I don't even remember what shiny looks like.
The meat in the market sits there all day in the hot sun, and people buy
it and eat it for the next couple of days. The fish in the market smell
horrible, almost like they were already eaten and then pooped out, and
are now sitting on a tray in front of me. It's different here, the
money is dirty looking, and straight up dirty, the food isn't always
safe, the hands are never clean, but this is Tchad, and I love it. I
love almost every part of it, I mean I could live without pooping
babies, but it's really not that bad. Today when you go to town, just
take a look at how blessed you are, and how clean things really are back
home. God wants to do this with our lives. He wants to take it and
make us clean, as white as snow, beautiful. We have a choice today, to
either walk around with poopy hands, or to walk around with clean
hearts. What will you choose today?