A day in the Life

The other day I was standing outside my apt complex waiting on a friend when I saw an elephant walking down our street towards the highway. Now don’t be confused, I do live in the city, I’m on a paved street, fairly busy, that is directly off one of the main roads that runs throughout the city. This was a work elephant that was coming from further down my street where more houses are (they are doing construction on some big apt buildings farther in the neighborhood so I’m guessing it was working on one of those buildings) going towards the main street! As I watched, there were a lot of motorcycles, cars, and rickshaws that were all honking and going around this un-phased elephant just walking along. Sometimes he would stop and eat some leaves from a nearby tree but mostly he just walked along the side of the street with two men riding on his back. They didn’t have any means of controlling the elephant that I could see, probably just their legs putting pressure on the side they wanted him to turn.  Anyways, the elephant walked right past me, within touching distance. I didn’t want to whip out my camera since no one else seemed shocked to see the elephant, I didn’t want to lose my street cred!

That same day the streets were pretty flooded due to some intense rain the past couple of days. When I say the streets flooded I mean the sewers from the side of the roads were now in the road… up to your calf. You have to visualize this from the beginning, when there is not water covering the streets, you have to be careful not to step in the cow poop littering the street and to step to close to the side of the roads where the gutter filled with sewage water is (and this is in the city where they have a semi sense of plumbing) so once it is covered in brown water, you have an idea of what’s making it brown… let’s just agree that it’s not just the mud. Even though it was pretty flooded, we still went out to visit some nearby villages. I was wearing my new Toms which meant that even after I had escaped the block of flooded street, I was still sloshing around in the poop water stuck in my shoes…  the people just accepted it and went on with their business, so I had to too- I tried not to think about what I was actually walking through. Some people (mostly kids) accepted the flooded courtyard and street so much so that they went ahead and saved the trip to the bathroom by stepping outside their door to pee from their front step. Honestly this fact did not endear me to the water I was walking through much. Can you imagine living in a flood zone and having to accept the poopy water coming into your house and invading your kitchen/bedroom?! I only had to endure the water for a few hrs until I came home and took a good shower, they had to stay in the wet mud/poop (at that point you can’t tell which is which). It definitely gave me something to think about.