The Great Inscape

The last night in our Community Based Training was also the night that the local group of community leaders threw a party for us. It was lovely, just lovely. We played games and said “thank-yous” and goodbyes and then ate a lot of really good food and cake.

The party went pretty late, and after the walk home we were pretty tired. Well, when we got there, my host sister realized that her brother wasn’t here and he had the keys to the house. His cell is broken and I’m pretty sure we couldn’t have called him from here anyways. So, we were stuck. My host mother went off to look for help, while my host sister and I sat down and waited in defeat.

Suddenly, something occurred to me. I’d cleaned out my backpack in an effort to pack efficiently and had removed the set of keys they gave me to the house and left them on the dresser. I also realized that my window was open and remembered that I’d seen a large, long, thin stick outside of the house. (How all of these things worked together so well I’ll never know.) I retrieved the stick and sure enough, it was long enough to reach the keys. Now the only problem was configuring a way to get the keys on the end of the stick. Luckily, my host sister was right there with the solution. We’d built a chicken coop at my house as a group the weekend before and some of the supplies were outside. She found a rock and hit a nail into the end of the stick. Then I got to be Ms. McGyver once again and finagle a way to get the key ring over the nail and onto the stick. Well, I was successful, and we were in the house in less than 5 minutes after having arrived.

Sometimes you hear sad being locked out stories. Other times you get to hear good ones. This is one of those good ones because it is very rare that I get to be the hero, and even more rare that I get to be in a country where I don’t speak the language well and end up looking a fool more often than I’d like. I was such a hero that night.

That wonderful song from The Great Escape was totally playing as this all happened, by the way.

Another by the way, the more you tell me you like my photos and blogs, the more photos I will take and blogs I will write. I respond quite strongly to this sort of reinforcement. So for those of you who have been telling me you read or enjoy those 2 websites, you have only yourselves to thank for the updates because without you having told me you do that, I wouldn’t do my part nearly as often.