Water

In a community kind of near (in car-speak) to Zeway, we met a woman in a pink dress with bright eyes and tattos on her cheeks. I saw a lot of these tattoos in Zeway, they are really really beautiful, sometimes patterns of lines, or a moon. The woman invited us over to her house so she could tell us on film about the problems women have where she's from.

We drove through sand or dust off of car roads to come to the hut which was made of sticks woven around and around. The half-built houses look like huge bird nests because they are upside down like a round cup made of wood. Inside the house, tied in the corner were baby goats..I never saw a baby goat before so I had no clue what they were, but I was all excited because they looked like sweet-faced tiny aliens.

The woman sat with her mother and a circle of men including her husband and some of the little kids. They told us how its hard, its common for women to die in childbirth because the hospital is so far away. They also told us the main problem they're having is with water. They had sent the rest of their kids out to find water early that morning and they hadn't come back yet. Again with how generous everyone here is, they apologized for not offering us water, but sometimes they didn't have any for days.

I noticed even though they are having this....hard time (an understatement- but phwoooshh I'm trying to make my words fit their meanings), theres so much laughter and light between them. It made me think of how a few days before a woman in that same community had spoken about America, "We are poor," she said, "but I think they have a different kind of starvation."