This is an on going record of all of the funniest and most absurd moments that have happened in the trip thus far.

-When Grimm and I first got into Africa, the very first person that we met was a girl named Stacy. She, believe it or not, was an F& M student.
-One day Spud, Grimm, and I decided that we wanted to go on a walk. Josephati said something to us about it, but none of us really understood what he was saying. So we ended up just leaving. We walked about thirty minutes up a mountain, taking at least 4 random turns at 4 intersections. We then paused at the top to take pictures of the scenery. We were there at least 5 minutes, and then turned around to retrace our steps. Right when we started walking back down the mountain we saw Josephati. He had been following our foot prints the whole way up the mountain. How he did this, was beyond me.
-We have had many tragic incidents with our misquito nets since we have been here. For those of you that have never encountered a misquito net before, it is a long 6-10 foot circular net that vaguely resembles the underlining of a tutu if it were camouflage green.
--The first incident was with spud’s net. There is a hoop that is connected to the top of the netting to make the net come out broader. For reasons unbeknownst to Spud (wow I have never used that word before… feels pretty good), this hoop just popped off. This doesn’t seem that bad, but it is literally the most frustrating thing to try to reattach it… especially when your friends (me and grimm) are just sitting back and laughing at you. Eventually the three of us got it back on.
--Later that night (I believe) the same thing happened to me, which Spud found absolutely histarical. Apparently its more funny when it doesn’t happen to you.
--The next night when we were getting ready to go to bed, my whole net fell down. I soon discovered that I could not put this back up by myself, so Spud, being the good friend that he was, tried to help me… all the while laughing histarically. While we were attempting to put it up, Spud lost his balance and fell into me while jerking the net down on top of us. This jerking force, caused my hoop to fall of yet again. After about several minutes we put the hoop on and the net up. It was getting late, so I started tucking the net into my bed to keep those skeeters out, when I felt the hoop hit my head. Since that time, I have put the hoop in time out for its misbehavior and it is currently, and permantly laying on the ground.
-While we are on the topic of myself, I will tell you about the ‘Hoss’ bad day’. This day started out rather ineventful. We ate breakfast and helped do some chores and then relaxed until lunch time, which has been typical of our stay. We then went into eat, and Josephati told us ‘welcome’ indicated that we can go eat. I was first to the service table to see three plates that were covered up. I knew right away that this would not be good. I uncovered the first plate to find a plate full of ‘egg and chips’. They basically made French fries, and put them in a frying pan, and added about 3 or 4 eggs and fried it into an egg and potato disc. I don’t know if you know this, but I hate eggs. It is one of the few things that I really can’t bring myself to eat. I looked back and grimm and spud trying to hide my face of disgust and horror only to see them trying to hide their laughter. In the hopes that not all of the plates would be the same, I gave the first one to Spud (making it appear that I was just being a good friend and giving it them first). I uncovered the second one and saw the same thing and gave it to grimm. I came to the last plate only to find that it to was eggs. Now normally they have other food out for you to choose from, but today, for some odd reason, this was the only thing on the table. So I, not wanting to be a bad guest, bit the bullet and decided to eat it. About 10 minutes later, after I had already eaten half of the plate, and after Spud and grimm had just about spit up half their food from laughing at my expense, the rest of the staff came to join us. They were each carrying a bowl full of food… none of which was eggs, and all of which I was dying to eat. And to top it all off, our host at the end came and gave us all bananas to eat that he opened for us. This brought a smile to my face because not only did I like bananas… but Spud hates fruit, and infact has never eaten it (to his knowledge) in his life. I was smelling revenge… and it was sweet. Little did I know that spuds respect and care for josephati was nothing compared to his determination not to ever eat fruit, so Spud never ate it. Later that day, we were walking with josephati to a market, and I had been wearing sandals that had been rubbing against my feet all day. This became so annoying that I took off my sandals and walked barefoot through the streets. This was going rather swimmingly until I stepped into the stickiest, squishiest poo. Then later that night after supper was over, we went back to our rooms. I was well over due for my visit to the bathroom and went right after spud to relieve myself. Lets just say that I felt like a lost a couple pounds while I was in there. Anyways I then flushed the toilet and nothing really happened. This is typical due to the bad toilets so I tried again and water barely trickled out. I thought for sure that I clogged the toilet. I then tried the sink and no water came out, and then I tried the shower and no water came out. I was convinced that I clogged the toilets so bad that somehow shut off all the water. I soon found out that I was infact wrong, and soon thereafter I was able to flush it down. The last thing that happened during this day was that my misquito netting fell down… infact I put it up and it fell down twice.
-Grimm one day was rather excited about his trip to the bathroom that he was about to take which caused him to pee a little too fast. He ended up peeing directly on himself.
-I (hoss) picked a little girl up named Flora. I was walking around with her for a little bit looking at all of the dirt and mud on her. She had just been playing in little puddle. She started crying a little bit, for reasons I couldn’t figure out. I noticed that my shirt started to get wet, but I attributed that to her puddle. I soon found out that she infact had just peed all over me.
-This actually happened:
Cow: Moooo
Spud: is that my cell phone?
Me: that’s a cow.
-So the other day we were sitting at the table with a couple of kids. We never really play with them inside because there isn’t much to do, so Spud asked us if we knew any games to play with the kids inside. Grimm quickly replied ‘spin the bottle.’
-I would like to report that while lightning does not typically strike twice, there are other things that do. In the same day, I was given a whole plate of eggs to eat for lunch (again), and I was peed on (again) by Flora… I guess that there could be worse things that could happen twice. For instance losing half of my memory or losing a kidney. Let me note however that yet again Spud showed me no sympathy as a scarfed down the eggs… thus the I will search all the more intently for a way of making him (knowingly or unknowingly) eat fruit.
-This may not be that funny or absurd, but it is noteworthy. I, Andrew Monroe Hostetter have swong Andrew something Grimm around off the ground by his legs completely under my own power. We have photo documentation of this. This great feat was one of my prouder moments in life.
-One of the funniest parts of everyday is our shower time. Now before your mind goes places it shouldn’t, none of us have ever so much been in the bathroom at the same time. But what makes taking a shower so interesting is that we have no hot water. Our water is frequently described as: fridged, cold, numbing, and life changing. This is basically how every shower goes… at least for me. We get up every morning and I yell I call shower last. Grimm takes his shower first, followed by Spud. The reason why I constantly choose to go last is the same reason that people would choose to delay their execution… when the time comes you are not sure you will make it out alive. Also, I enjoy hearing their moans and yelps when they muster the courage to finally go under the shower head. When it is my turn, I go in, strip down, and turn on the shower. I stand outside of the shower for a minute or two while I give myself a preshower pep talk. In never seems to really work. So I end up just putting my head under the water first figuring it would be less shocking then if my whole body was not immersed in the liquid ice. I then suds up and do the same with each limb and then splash it on my body. I then just jump completely under the shower and thrash around as quick and possible to try to get the water precisely on the areas of my body that still have soap. I usually can’t stop myself from uttering a ‘whoo’ or two. Then when I am done I turn it off. At the end it normally feels very refreshing… but it still doesn’t stop me from debating the next day whether I need one.
-I don’t know how funny you all will find this, but I certainly chuckled a bit when I saw it. Grimm, Spud and I got dropped off in town one day. We had to go to the bank and wanted to then go to an internet café to email all of you lovely people. We finished these objectives rather quick, and decided to walk around the town a bit until Josephati came to pick us up. Now something that you have to understand is that the people down here are relatively poor. I think I heard the unemployment rate was 70 percent. So when they see white people, they see big dollar signs above our heads. So everywhere we went we had people trying to sell us things using their limited English vocabulary. None of us were interested in buying anything because we still had three weeks left here and we didn’t feel like carrying things around with us, so we all did our best to communicate to them that we weren’t interested. Spud and I did a pretty good job at that. I had about one person try for about 5 minutes to get me to buy something. Grimm on the other hand was not quite as successful. For about the entire twenty we were walking, grimm had at least people around him thrusting things into his face and trying to talk him into buying it. I think that main problem was that grimm, being the nice guy his is, actually entertained them. In fact, not wanting to belittle them, he acted interested and even went as far as to hold many of their products for multiple minutes at a time all the while trying to talk their price down. It was so funny to turn around and see grimm completely surrounded by these people. This all also seemed very ironic to me because grimm has been a world traveler since birth and has been to dozens of countries, and yet he still hadn’t learned his lesson. As the saying goes, if you give a mouse a cookie… he’ll want some milk (I think that is a saying).
-One of the funniest things that have happened to us thus far is our epic pursuit of Lindsey Winiefred Cook via our international cell phone. Lindsey is volunteering in Tanzania at the same time as we are, and being that she is a good friend of ours we wanted to meet up with her at some point during our free time. Lindsey gave us her cell number to call her. Now our pursuit started out rather well. A day or two into the trip we decided to call her so we could reserve a day to see her… and we were successful… somewhat. We got her voice mail. So Spud left her a message telling her to call us back on this number to figure out when we could all get together. After a couple more days, she still hadn’t called us back, so we decided to call her again. When Lindsay gave spud the number via the internet, he immediately programmed it into the phone as her cell number, and allegedly had checked her number twice. When we called her the second time, Spud found her number under dialed numbers and called it. Here again we had a bit of success, our call was actually connected!... but instead of hearing lindsay’s perky voice we heard a man saying something in Swahili. This confused us all a bit because we had dialed the exact same number as before. A couple days later we decided to call again. This time they made me do it. So I found her number again under recently dialed numbers, and it was labeled lindsay’s cell as before, and clicked the call button. It rang and yet again I got the answering machine…. But it wasn’t Lindsay’s answering machine, it was my father’s Phil Hostetter. None of the guys believed me when I told them it, so I went back and looked at the number I had just ‘dialed’ and saw infact that what spud put under lindsay’s cell phone number was the exact same cell number that my father had. So as of now, none of us are quite sure how we will get a hold of Lindsay… if there even is a real Lindsay Cook.
-There were a lot of funny things that happened while we were on the safari. There was our incredibly slow driver, the Germans who we ran into all the time at random places, having to get out and push our jeep while standing feet from lions… yes lions plural, sleeping with zebras and trying to herd them (I could have probably touched one if I had sprinted at it), but the funniest (unfortunately) was my toilet experience. Unlike grimm who can hold it til christimas, I am unable to hold it for several days. So by the end of the safari, I was getting ready to burst. Thankfully we had made it back to our camp site, which had bathrooms. So I eagerly ran into the bathroom and encountered my first problem… there was no lights. Luckily it was dark already so I had my trusty wind-up flashlight (thanks mom), so I propped that bad boy up and got ready to do what I do best. Then I turned and looked at the toilet… if you can call it that. It was a hole in the ground with two little rumble strips on the side. They looked like the imprint of the astronauts boot on the moon. Having never encountered anything like this in the bathroom, I was kind of unsure exactly the physics of the device. I figured it was a squatter, but when I went down for a test flight I ascertained that if I tried to take care of #1 and 2 at the same time, I would either end up with one of those two on the ground. I also knew that it would not be possible to do only one at a time do to the urgency of the moment. So after much debating, I decided just to sit on the ground. The moment I sat down I felt my whole leg get soaked in what I can only hope to be muddy water. To further worsen the occasion, I ended up getting bitten by some kind of bug which I never found in an area where no bug belongs. To top it off, I went to the sinks to find that not only was there no water except for one faucet that had a constant trickle, but there was no soap which was an absolute necessity after this occasion. I looked up to find two promising bottles, one was windex and the other toilet bowl cleaner. I knew that it would be inhumane for me to leave the bathroom without attempting some form of the biohazard cleanup that was needed after this experience, so I again weighed my options. I ended up washing my hands in windex because I figured I would be dumb for me to wash my hands with something that went into the toilet. This traumatic event did end on a higher note. I went back to my tent and found some handy wipes (again thank you mom), so I was able to pretty thoroughly clean myself up. So the lesson here boys and girls is that adult diapers are underrated.
-The other really funny experience that happened on the safari was occurred during the last hour of our safari. We were getting eating a packed lunch inside of the Ngoragora Crater which is a huge wildlife reserve that is inside of an inactive volcanoes crater. When we got out of the jeep our guide warned us of the monkeys that were around here; he told us that there are a certain bad group of monkeys which frequently harass the tourists. Having looked around and not seeing or hearing any monkeys we all quickly (too quickly that is) dismissed his comment. We decided to eat our lunch in a patch of grass next to huge bushes which easily could have concealed a host of animals, and a path leading to the bathroom. We were having just a jolly good time talking about the animals we saw, when out of the corner of my eye I saw this grey animal come sprinting directly toward the back of Spud and Grimm. At first glance I thought that this was a rabbit, but I soon realized that this was in fact the monkey that we had been warned about. By the time I got out “O my God, there’s a…” the monkey had literally tackled Grimm’s lunch box. Considering Grimm had no idea this feller was coming, he was startled quite a bit, and jumped back. But when he realized that his lunch was in peril, he sprang back on his lunch box and actually physically his the monkey away. The monkey, not wanting to go away empty handed sprang back and got his hands on Grimm’s banana and sprinted off. Spud later decided that it would be fun to try to lure him in again with his banana so that he would conveniently not have a banana to eat. So he placed it about a foot away from himself. After the monkey finished grimm’s banana he came back for seconds, and slowly crept his way towards us. We all watched him come, and yet Spud was unable to even put a hand on the monkey. I am convinced that he never really wanted to try and that it was all a ploy to not have to eat is fruit.
-The first day that we got back from the safari we were playing with the kids out on the patio because of it had rained that day. This is where I saw Spud doing what could have been interpreted in the wrong way. Spud interrupted my play with one of the kids to ask ‘Hoss you want to come to bed with us?’ You should know that there is a girl named Sophina who loves playing house with Spud, and has done so on most of the days that we have been here. On this particular occasion, she decided that it was bed time. So she and Spud took these big mats that they use to fold laundry on and used it as a bed and covers and were laying on/in. This situation continued to look more funny because next Spud asked a really little girl Flora who had been watching them if she wanted to join them… all the while reading a Tickle-Me-Elmo book. Its nice having a funny/awkward situation about someone else to write about for a change… so thank you Spud.
-The other day we were helping this guy Venice build a cooking shack for the orphanage, when for some reason I don’t remember we started talking about money. Grimm mistakenly slipped in his speech, and instead of saying ‘Shekels’ said ‘shingles’. This in itself was not that funny, but then we started talking about how ridiculous it would be if that really was a countries currency. A Shingle would be worth more than any other countries currency… wallets would reach record high sizes… chiropractors would have a ton of new business due to people having to carry them around… and bank robbery would be all but eliminated do to how heavy multiple thousands dollars of shingles would weigh. I realize that this may not be the funniest to you, but we had hoot talking about it.
-Did you know that Chuck Norris counted to infinity… twice, or that he invented C-section when he round house kicked his way out of his mother’s womb, or that he makes onions cry?
-Grimm’s new nickname is John Henry. I gave him this name while we were digging a huge whole in the ground. I realize that this was not exactly what the real John Henry did, but the name stuck.
-One of the coolest things that we have seen is Venice work on the shed. For you engineers, carpenters and basically anyone who has swung a hammer, you know how crucial measurements and blueprints are to producing a good final product. Thus far in our quest of shack building, he has only measured twice. Just about everything that we did, he eyeballed. Infact, all of his precise measurements have been done with basically only twine. The only tools he brought was string, a hammer, machete, shovels, hoes, and two cementing tools which I can’t think of the name of but basically are just flat objects. What he had he used in ways I couldn’t imagine. He used his machete to make one end of his sticks sharp so it would go into the ground easier, which was a cool thing to begin with, but he also used it to cut through cement blocks. When I figured out that he was about to do that, I almost laughed. To think that a machete that was just a metal blade that was less than 1/8th of an inch thick was capable of cutting through a huge cement block was not something my brain was prepared to grasp. But sure enough, it did it… with great speed too. Several times they cut these blocks… and every time it was done in less than 20 seconds, and it worked every time. And the craziest thing was that the machete wasn’t even dull afterwards! So because of these experiences I have concluded that as far as cutting devices go… the best goes to the machete, closely followed by grimms leatherman which has come in handy on several occasions, and then Chuck Norris’s fists.