culture clash

I'm on call all weekend...which basically means I get the pager and am responsible for all the new crew when they first arrive, and have to sign off those who are departing us this weekend. This morning, however, a lovely lady in my department covered for me which freed me up for a few hours to head out to New Georgia and the Orphanage. We had a good time, as ever. A family who are long term crew onboard came with us, including their two little boys. The children at the Orphange hadn't seen white children before, and after the intial crazy first half hour, to watch them play side by side was beautiful. Another skin-colour breakthrough was made today. There is a 1 1/2 year old boy at the Orphanage who hates white people, and especially me. Last Saturday as soon as he saw me he screamed (I honestly don't have that effect on all children!) Today, however, after a little bit of high-fiving, he came and sat on my lap for ages..... until I noticed a warm wet patch on my skirt and thanked him kindly for peeing all over me!!
So now I'm back on the ship and the culture clash gets me every single time. We serve out bowls of rice in palm oil to the children at the Orphanage and then head back to the ship, where I'm faced with that oh so difficult dilema of how to make my packed lunch a little more appealing. But I'm not the one eating rice in palm oil every day. It really does get me every single time, the vast distance I feel between "us" and "them" when I return to the ship. This has become a constant struggle for me, as so much of my experience of Liberia came from living out in New Georgia alongside the local people, and I loved being alongside....knowing that I was going to have to go back and light the coals to cook my dinner and head to the well to draw water for my bucket shower. Now I just head to the galley for food and my shower water comes from a faucet and gets sucked away by the ship's evac system.
Speaking of the evac system...and I think this may be what has made today's culture shock a little more pronounced.... as part of beign "on duty" in the hospitality department, one of the random tasks of the day is to flush all toilets in empty cabins. So I've just completed my tour of the ship flushing a whole bunch of toilets. Many people on the other side of the port gates don't even have a toilet, and certainly not one the has a high-tech microbial-balanced flushing system that requires flushing every day! My life is such a bizarre fusion of cultural clashes....a realisation which was today triggered by a whole bunch of toilets.