The wooden house was not very wide, but it extended far out over the water and was surprisingly big. The front door opened onto one large room that made up over half of the house. All that was in this entire room was an old broke-down sideboard, a heavy stool, a small table, and the dirtiest mattress that I have ever seen. The house also had three smaller rooms that must have been bedrooms except that only one of them had a bed –with no mattress – in it. The other two were completely empty except for the coat of gritty dust that seemed to cover every horizontal surface in the house. Eric explained this was a bigger-than-average house for this village and that he had been told that this man had raised his family here, but they were all grown and gone now.
My students and I milled about trying to acclimate ourselves to the place where we would be spending the night. Eric told me that they asking around in the village trying to secure some mattresses for us. Well, that will certainly help improve our situation, I thought. They might not be the best, but we certainly couldn’t sleep directly on the wooden floor. I could look between the floorboards and see the water below us.
The word spread among our group that there was an outhouse out back. I realized that I needed to make use of it. I stepped over and around backpacks and suitcases and a few students and made my way to the back of the house. I stepped out the back door and onto a large deck -the middle section of which was in complete disrepair. I had to be sure not to wander too far from the building as I made my way to the outhouse on the far edge of the deck. The outhouse was a little, wooden shack. The floor, like the rest of the deck, was made of rounded slats of bamboo spaced about an inch apart. In one corner, one of the bamboo slats had been cut short so as to create a square hole about the size of a tissue box. I thought of my co-leader, Amber, who was seven month pregnant and silently wished her luck.
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