Friday

Thank goodness it's Friday.
Friday means a quiet market, construction workers who leave our compound early, and football matches in the evenings. It means home delivery injera and wat (as in, a guy hops on his motorcycle and brings across the border to our house) and a few episodes of our latest addiction - bootlegged copies of the first few seasons of "Smallville." (I know it's lame, but we are nothing if not easily entertained.)
I'm glad it's Friday too because it's felt like a really long week to me. I've been frustrated a lot. The charms of living on a construction site by day and a campsite by night are wearing a little thin. We can see progress every day so I know I should only be thankful. Our toilet is working so beautifully that sometimes I want to sit in there far longer than is necessary, and our well-fed solar panels are generating lots of bright white light into the tent. Our neighbors across the way are still happy to let us mooch off of their internet which is incredible (though sometimes in order to skype we have to sit with our laptops in the waist-high grass of the field between our two plots - like that guy in the ad they show at the beginning of every British Airways flight.)
But even with all these wonderful things I have felt frazzled all week. When I realized that the curtains for our tent that I had worked so hard to explain in Arabic to the tailor fell off of the back of my motorcycle somewhere on the way home, you would have thought I had just lost the Shroud of Turin. When the pot of lentil sloppy joes I had made for guests came out tasting like lentil dish-water I had an internal melt-down. When the sprung rat trap was dagged half way across the yard and empty two mornings in a row I started just waiting for the maimed rodents to hunt me down. And these are just the "big" things. I have been frustrated over a dozen more little stupid things all week.
So on our night to relax a little, I reflect back on this long week, hope that next week is better and thank all of the people who made this week really not as bad as it seemed some times - the vegetable vedor who bought us a frozen orange drink just for trying to speak Arabic with him; my husband for for going back to look for my lost curtains and for the man on the side of the road who found them for us; the guy who teased me for wearing a rival soccer jersey and all those silly little kids who ran down the road with us on our jog this morning. And lastly, for my three new chickens whose ungraceful panic over grossly exaggerated and misplaced fears makes me cringe and laugh on an almost daily basis.