As teased earlier, here comes the dead bird story. I can only hope I do the story justice. (Also, because I’m covering the dead bird story, I do not take responsibility for talking about the rice paddy adventure with Alyssa, Eliot, and Cameron.)

Alyssa and I were roommates in Wugao and stayed with a nice host family comprised of a father, a mother, and a daughter. The father and daughter spoke Mandarin and the mother only spoke Miao. I speak neither language, so I knew I was in for a fun time (think lots of hand motions, blank stares, and awkward laughter). At first, nobody in our host family seemed super keen on interacting with us, but after a day (and the fateful dinner where we spoke about Miao hairstyles) the father seemed to really open up to us. Alyssa and I had a great time that night, so we invited Eliot and Reuben over to hang out with us during our last night in Wugao.

Things proceeded along a similar path as the night before. I experienced it differently than the other three SOSers, though, because I was only one of us that didn’t speak Mandarin. I got the majority of the conversation secondhand. However, it was easy to understand most of our host father’s jokes because he used a lot of body language. In the middle of one of our conversations, he casually reached behind himself and grabbed a dead bird off of a table. Needless to say, the four of us were shocked. Apparently, he wasn’t going to use the bird for anything – he had found it that day and just found it interesting to keep around (and show us). He was pretty amused by our reactions to it, because he was waving it all over the place, and whenever it got close to any of us, we would quickly lean away from it. Everyone shared a good laugh when host dad pretended to throw the bird at me, and I jumped back so quickly I almost fell off of my stool. After that, dinner ended, and we took some family pictures (sans bird).

Our last night in the Miao village was a fun one, but I’m glad we moved on to the Dong village yesterday. I knew there could only be more adventures to be had. Similar to the Miao villages we have visited, we were greeted by a “way blocking” committee. The overall mission of these groups of enthusiastic, singing women is to stand in your way and not let you in to the village until you take a drink from a bowl that one of them is holding. At this village, we were greeted with rice wine instead of tea;  to be quite honest, I didn’t even taste the rice wine because there was an added twist: super spicy fish. After drinking from a bowl held by one woman, another one promptly fed me a small morsel of fish. I was not ready for the spice that assaulted my mouth, and I thought my tongue was on fire. Not necessarily in a bad way…but not a super great way, either. It was an experience.

The crowd of woman was accompanied by an even larger crowd of children, which I was really excited about. In the Wugao, we didn’t get to see that many children, and the ones we did see were usually boys. However, at the Dong village, there were so many children everywhere, of all ages, and the distribution between boys and girls seemed fairly equal. When we had some free time after passing the way blocking committee, I went outside to explore with the rest of the SOS girls. The kids seemed happy to meet us and show us around, even if they were a bit shy at first. I made sure to show them the pictures I took, and I was always greeted with a cheerful laugh in response.

I’ve really enjoyed hiking through these beautiful Chinese mountainsides (despite the occasionally dangerous rice paddies? Too soon to joke, Eliot?) and visiting a handful of villages. Each one has its own unique charms to reveal. Similar to Reuben, I can’t believe that our WildChina trip is going to end so soon.

The next time you hear from me, I’ll be in Jishou!

– Kelsey