Day 72: Delivery day

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Another delivery day. It amazes me how during the week, I thought we had done a good job filling up the holding containers with clean sand, pebbles and gravel only to have them emptied between us and the drill team. It was a comparable feeling to how I feel about laundry, dishes and showering...they always need to be done again even immediately after you finished them. The deliveries themselves were pretty straight forward, I did get a promotion to being allowed to help lower the filters out of the truck. As Shelby's dad would say..."we're so fit!" I also came more prepared with a neck gator to pull up over my face while we are in the truck to block out the passing car fumes and the dust from the dirt roads. The highlight of today again was lunch at a local chief's home. The first day of delivery we also stopped here for lunch. Menu one was rice, a delicious sauce (I have now learned it is fish sauce) which is spicy and flavorful, soup, and fish. The tough part about this meal was the fish. It was delicious once you got to the meat, but getting to the meat required breaking into the fish because it was still fully intact and resembled a bullhead. It was a replay of Germany and zwiebelmett meat: the battle of brain saying that is not suppose to be eaten and taste buds saying it is pretty good. Today, we got appetizers of rice dough filled with beans or pork. They were cooked over the stove in banana palm leaves. This gave enough time for the chief to get back on his motorcycle with a chicken (yes alive). Lunch consisted of rice, another delicious sauce and soup and another battle of brain and taste: the chicken was simple cut up and still had all its pieces (talons, intestines, bones, meat) in the soup. I wish I grew up eating this way because I know back home I am so wasteful of many parts of an animal, but oh my is it difficult to learn to eat it now. I did my best, but I might have to spend my summer reading Laura Ingles and trying their approach to pig butchering to up my game or become vegetarian.

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