> tapioca world tour

Indonesia is hard. I’m not tough enough. I can’t endure the intense heat and humidity, the Palang food (apparently), the lack of toilets and running water. It’s just hard. If it were, I dunno, 30 degrees cooler, I think I’d be fine. But it’s like 90-something and it’s just very difficult.

After our four-hour drive, during which I saw an ELEPHANT and a MONKEY on the side of the road, I spent half of our partner visits yesterday sleeping in the back of the car with the motor running and air conditioning on. I’ve restricted my diet to power bars and Sprite. But feeling sorry for myself isn’t very satisfying, especially when I go to small rural villages and befriend swarms of Muslim children who survived the tsunami at their doorsteps last year, and who chase me through the unpaved streets until I photograph them. The older girls wanted to see their pictures on the digital camera LCD, but hesistated. I had to notice that they wanted to be photographed because they wouldn’t ask. These two were inseparable. Behind them you can see how much land was destroyed when the water came in, and the houses being (re)built to the left.