Life at POC at 5am

It's 5am and I'm wide awake. If I were in my own place, I would just get up and start going about the tasks of the day. Today, we're going to town for a massive shopping trip and buying everything we think we'll need for the month of village living, trying not to err on the side of not enough and going hungry (or being stressed by eating PNG cuisine all the time) and trying not to err on the side of excess and perpetuate the mentality that white people have endless access to tons and tons of unnecessary cargo.

I need to prepare a diaper bag for James (between diarrhea and diaper rash, that kid has been going through a lot of diapers!). I need to double check my shopping list and empty out my bag so I can put in my wallet, my cell phone, and have room for some purchases. I also wouldn't be opposed to a cup of coffee.

But alas, I'm not in my own place. I'm in a room where James sleeps three feet from our bed and all our stuff is "neatly" stacked inside. Luckily, a POC veteran advised us to bring shoe organizers to have places to put some things and that's helped a bit. But when the schedule is as jam packed as it is, we only really use our room to sleep and collect/drop off our belongings. As in, we grab our clothes off the line, drop the basket (which is also the hamper) on the floor and run to our next class. So, the next time we have dirty clothes, they go on the floor until we finally get around to folding.

The walls (too smooth to be plywood, but I'm nearly positive it's not dry wall, maybe just sheets of woods?) are so thin, I can see light from our neighbors room coming through nail holes. Needless to say, the function of the walls is more for visual privacy than keeping sound or (*ahem*) smells in their proper place.

I could sit in the courtyard. The doors to all 13 units opens into it. There's a concrete cistern that pokes it's head out of the earth enough to find a seat on it, though it's not very comfortable. And at 5am, I wouldn't have to worry about the sun burning me, though the mosquitos would probably eat me alive.

If it were the weekend, I would good to my hauskuk (the structure we made as a "house" for our cooking) and hope there was enough kindling cut that I could start a fire without splitting firewood, always an unwelcome sound at 5 am. But not only is it not the weekend, hauskuk weekend's are over. The entire structure was torn down yesterday and the next time we cook for ourselves it will be in the village.

Instead, I'm waiting for my family to awaken. (Oops! They just did. Maybe I'll be able to write another post before we leave for the village. Though I hope I painted a nice picture of life here in my 5 am plight. Though, it's 6 now!)