To everyone who has been checking the blog within the past week I am very sorry. Hopefully you have not given up hope on my posting
something but this first week has been exhausting.
I want to write down the story of how we got here and then I will probably add more of what has been going on this week because there has been a LOT.
We arrived last week after one long plane ride and one short plane ride. After a two mile drive down a dirt road we were dropped off in the square of our small village Ibrahimpasa. We got out of the bus and our driver helped us with our bags. The square is small. There is a fountain, a tea shop, and a little market. The only people I could see in the square were men, maybe two dozen, and they were all looking at us.
A group of young boys came up and started talking to the bus driver. The driver was obviously in a hurry to drop off the other passengers. He asked one of the boys, who had a black eye, something more and the boy nodded. The driver turned to us and said, "This child will show you," he then got back on the bus and drove off. The boy he was talking to smiled really wide and grabbed one of our big, very heavy, bags and said, "This way!"
At this time it was getting pretty dark and the boy was rattling our big checked rollie suitcase down a cobblestone alley. Stray cats were running everywhere and the alley smelled like a farm. There are no street signs in our village and the only information the residency gave us by email was that the number of our house was 161. I suddenly had a terrible feeling in my gut. We had gotten into a big scam and the residency didn't exist at all. I thought about how all of our correspondences had been by email and we didn't really know anything about these people who we had just flown half way around the world to spend two months with total strangers.
Or I thought it was possible that this little boy had a scam of his own. When I did my student exchange in China my junior year I ran into a bunch of scamers. It was totally possible that this boy was going to bring us down this dark hard to navigate alley to a gang of other little boys where they would beat us and then steal all the art supplies we had worked so hard to organize and packed so carefully.
As we were nearing the bottom of the steep hill alley, our wheels from the bags making a huge racket, we were greeted by two women peeking over top of the roof of the house we were passing, "Oh hello! We thought we heard some luggage sounds!"
The boy didn't stop but continued to the door fifteen feet ahead and started shouting, "Paul! Paul! Paul!" He opened the door and beckoned us in. I looked up nervously at the ladies on the roof and they motioned for us to follow the boy, "Oh you can go inside. You need to meet Paul."
We followed the boy into the walled in terrace when a tall man came out from another door and animatedly chatted with the little boy before shooing him back outside. He turned to us and in a dutch accent said, "Oh hello hello! I am Paul. What on earth! You two have more luggage than anyone I have seen!" Paul is the partner of Willemijn, the woman who runs the residency. He helped us with our bags, gave us a quick run down of essentials, showed us our cave (the apartment we are living in is actually a cave), and set up a time the next day to go over our project and how the residency runs before we dropped our bags and passed out.
