Day 9

First night in the the Lahu village was an experience. As soon as it got dark out you had nothing to do, but go to sleep because they did not have electricity. We were all tired from the hike anyways so peaced to bed early. In the morning we woke up to roosters going off at like 5am. I will never ever ever have a rooster after this experience. Lets just say the roosters and I never really became friends... I was tempted to eat one just so it would never make another noise again, but that didn't happen.

Finally got out of bed/floor around 7, Yakha made us breakfast. Lets just say they had limited supply of food in the Lahu village so we ate the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday that we were there. After breakfast we put on our game face because it was work day. our plan was to build a water tank and allows these people to finally have running water. Spent most of the morning digging pipe lines, hard core I tell you. Mid day we breaked for lunch and then got right back to work lying piped in the ground and the digging continued. We finally got all the digging and pipes layed faster then what was expected. they thought it would take us two days to do that, but we never took any breaks and worked straight through the day. Now all we had to do was mix cement and build the actual water tank. As we started to mix cement the rain started so it was a mad dash to try and cover the cement before the rain ruined it... success. The rain finally stopped and we layed the first layer of cement for the base of the water tank. Once that was finished we couldn't do anything else until the next day because we had to let the cement dry.

You can only imagine how smelly we were so we decided to walk down to their shower/ really not a shower. Just a stream with running water, we washed up as best we could cause like I said before you can't take your clothes off. We got as clean as we could and then peace back to the village for supper. After supper Amanda and I went over to one of the houses and hung out with the village people. They couldn't speak English so it was quite interesting. We find common interest though... they rolled us up a tribal cigarette and Amanda spent the evening smoking tribal cigs with the viallge people. It was hilarious, and they loved it. Kept wanting us to keep smoking, finally we were like good god I can't have anymore.

In the later evening we got together as a group and played some cards and had little chats about how different the Lahu tribe lives compared to what we are use to. It was good to hear other peoples thoughts. Then it was bed time because I knew the rooster was be making noise in only a few hours. And plus we had another long day of water tank building in the am. Since we finaished more work then what was expected we decided as a group to also make a bamboo hut where the villagers could go inside and shower naked for the first time ever. Big day it was... but that's for another blog.