That night.

Next we went to our host families homes. My host mom’s name was Tobekah, also known as Toto. She was older and smaller than a lot of the other host moms. The house looked relatively nice. It was old and had decorations similar to older homes in America. My room had a king size bed in it and the bathroom attached to it. Toto showed me all the vegetarian “meat” that she had in her freezer.

Christen and her host mom came over and we had dinner together. Toto made me “vegetarian” meat. I am always nervous when people do this, because I feel like I have to like the “vegetarian” dish. To my surprise, based on the looks of this dish, I did like it. We watched T.V. while we ate dinner and talked a bit. Christen and her host mom left and soon after, I went to bed.

My room was connected to a bathroom. I asked if they would have to go through my room to go to the bathroom. They said they could just go outside. I didn’t really know what that meant, except I did not need to worry about it. My bed was a king size. There was an extra comforter folded at the foot of the bed. This oddly made me feel better. When I was little, I kept my bed made and I used random blanket to cover up with, so I did that there too.

I went to brush my teeth and noticed that the toilet didn’t work. There wasn’t any soap in the bathroom either. Also, the space connecting the bathroom and the room did not seem very secure. There was a tin roof that was similar to the roofs of the shacks. This scared me quite a bit. I felt that someone could easily break into the house in this part. There was a bowl in the corner of this area was well. I later found out that this is to catch the water from the leak in the roof (the water dripping is also really loud and made it very difficult to sleep at night). I wrote in my journal that night. I wish I could have had someone to talk to about my experience. The lamp that lighted the room randomly turned off before I was ready to go to bed. I had a moment of panic. I had to feel for the light switch on the wall and everything was black. I finally found the light switch on the dirty wall. I realized that the extension cord for the lamp was not very good quality and the connection between the lamp cord and the extension cord was fragile. After this, it was really hard to fall asleep. I had to keep telling myself that I was just camping. I was very cold. My host mom put a space heater in my room, but I felt bad using it. I had no idea what the morning would be like and I was very nervous about any kind of bugs or rodents in the house. I was assured that nothing would get in my suitcase, because I zipped up my suitcase and backpack-something that my dad always told me to do, even when staying in nice places.

This first night was very intimidating. Later, I relaxed about all these things and knew that I was safer than I thought. I did not see any bugs in the house throughout the week. Although I did see a mouse and my host mom just laughed when she saw it. They are most likely used to mice. Thankfully, I had mice in my last apartment and so I was somewhat okay with it.