We Love Canadians

We have been enjoying apartment living on our own since our Canadian house mates, Peter and Kristine, left for Canada for a month. For those of you who don't know, we didn't end up roughing it in the Nicaragua house for our entire stay. We lasted about a month. When Matt invited us to come volunteer at the farm, he said the only housing available was the Nic house. When Chris told me that we would be living in a place without electricity, running water or toilet - I started crying. My goal was for my life to be LESS crazy. After the initial shock, I made a deal with Chris: I would move to the farm with him if he agreed to come with me to the composting toilet in the middle of the night - whenever I needed to go. (This tends to be a nightly occurrence, unfortunately....and sometimes I have to go twice in one night.) Chris has kept his end of the deal and he even chases away the cockroaches before I go into the toilet. I am very thankful for that.

It was an interesting experience living in the Nic house, but around mid-July we noticed an extra room in Peter and Kristine's apartment and we brazenly asked them if we could move in. That was a moment that I appreciated Chris' lack of subtlety:

"We noticed an empty room in your apartment. Can we move in?"

They said yes and since then we have been living in relative climate-controlled luxury. Although it was fun waking up in the middle of the night to stumble along outside in a sleep-induced haze from the Nic house to the composting toilet, those days are past.

Speaking of the composting toilet, since Peter from Canada is the designated "peak knocker" in this building, and he's been gone for a month, the peak is starting to get a little too close for comfort. For those of you not familiar with composting toilet lingo, I'll explain. When people defecate into the composting toilet, the waste goes into a chamber directly below. As more and more waste piles up, the mound starts to form a peak, like a pyramid shape. When the peak of poop starts to get too high someone has to take a stick and knock it down so that the waste forms a more even surface at the bottom, so that there is room for more crap. Once the peak has been knocked quite a few times and the chamber is completely full, someone has to open up the pit and remove all the feces. Fortunately, this is only done a few times a year - and it hasn't been done while we've been here (although it would have made for some humorous blog material). I think the Farm waits to assign that task to some unsuspecting, enthusiastic group of spring-break college volunteers looking to change the world.

So other than the growing peak, things have been quiet around here without the Canadians. We have redecorated (i.e. swept the floor) and enjoyed having a little more space to ourselves. But we do miss them and our quality time together: long discussions about God, judgement, hell, cats, scripture, politics, bear attacks and taking shots of Chris' homemade kombucha. In Peter's absence, we keep all of his phrases alive. These are expressions of excitement said in a sort of monotone manner, kind of like the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

1. This is pretty much the best ever.

2. This is for real.

3. You talked me into it.

4. This is really happening.

5. This is unbelievable.

Before leaving, Peter's big project was selling frozen, chocolate-covered bananas at a movie night in downtown Waco. The bananas were fair-trade bananas, and selling them was a way of trying to educate people about fair-trade and the abuse going on in this industry. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check the farm website or I can send you one of Peter's pamphlets.