thanksgiving in this far away place!

i suppose i should reflect on the fact that today is thanksgiving, as i am making all of my students write about what they're thankful for and having a moderate level of success at that.

i thought, then, that i would tell you about how thankful i am for my...

new water filter!

the water in my town is not safe to drink. check out pictures "a" and "b" below for proof of this...picture a
picture b (and no, it's not that, this really is how brown the water is here some days...)

so for months (5 now), i have been surviving off of 13 litre water jugs and, on lazy days, 1.5 L water bottles to get me through and to keep my thirst quenched. as you can imagine, i've acquired quite a collection of these items and am still searching for a recycling bin in my town to donate them to. here is just a portion of them taking over the corner of my kitchen...

on a recent date, the peace corps kindly brought me a water filter to solve this problem. it is the magical, very stylish machine seen here...
and its function is to boil water, trap the steam and guide it through a system of fancy cooling tubes and then drip out the cool water droplets into the clear reservoir jug, thereby transforming my otherwise undrinkable water into pure, almost-fiji-like goodness.

the aftermath of what is left over from the water in the filter is quite a disgusting affair shown here...

so i hereby give thanks for this marvelous little machine that saves me lots of money, much effort necessarily exerted in hauling 13 litre jugs up 4 flights of stairs, and the planet a few empty plastic water bottles. hooray!

happy thanksgiving everyone! eat lots of jello and green bean casserole for me!