A Day in the Life

I was going to write a short post filled with quips and tales of being called out for falling asleep in English by the regional head of the Adventist Church of Cameroon during a five-hour-long, francophone church service and inadvertently offending a future coworker by shaking hands the wrong way....but instead I'll walk you through what I do during my day.

(Keep in mind that work starts Monday)

I wake up a little before 6am, because it's light outside and gather up all the tissues that litter the other twin mattress. (I'm on my third or fourth head cold, since arriving in country.) I head to the bathroom and check if I have a bucket of water, before I do my business. I have a toilet, but it doesn't flush, because I don't have running water. I expertly pour the bucket into the toilet maintaining the delicate balance of the right amount of force and the right amount of water splashed all over the floor.

I brush my teeth using filtered water and wash my face with well water. I do my grooming using my sink and a cut-up water bottle, but I know a lot of people prefer to do it outside.

I then get dressed, lock up and head to the market to get breakfast. I eat bouilli and beignets almost every morning. Bouilli is very fine powder that gets removed, when you rinse couscous de mais (basically grits). It then ferments and you make this paste stuff just right, add it to boiling water, wait till it's all creamy and delicious, add sugar and lime juice, and enjoy! Since making the paste just right seems to be beyond my limited abilities, when I'm ravenous, I generally just buy breakfast (10cents worth of bouilli, 20cents of beignets and  2ish cents per key lime) and call it a day!

Until recently, I've been splitting my eating time between the floor of my front porch or the toilet that I didn't use in the master bath. Now that I bought a bench, I sit at my table to eat. What luxury!

After I eat breakfast, I scrub one of the bathrooms, until I'm blue in the face. (Pictures to follow - it looked kind of like a gas station bathroom. You know the kind that the door doesn't shut well, there's no toilet paper and the ladies' is constantly out of order? That kind. To further my point, yesterday my neighbor asked me not to use the only toilet I've been using because it's deranging my neighbors. Evidently, everything that's been so efficiently flushed down my toilet has been sitting in the foot-wide space between my house and my neighbors'. Yuck.)

Once a week, I do my laundry, using buckets and a bar of laundry soap. I found out through a system of error and error that the powdered laundry soap makes all colors bleed. As a result, the only white shirt I brought now has yellow, blue and reddish stains all over it and I no longer have to worry about the fact that I managed to forget all tshirts and exercise shirts in the US.

Bouilli keeps you pretty full, so I generally eat lunch around 2 and make myself increasingly beautiful omelettes with fresh veggies (onions, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, etc), French bread and some fruit. Now that I have this feline of mine, I share the eggs.

In the afternoon, I sometimes take a nap or read for a little while or scrub more or go to the market and talk to the market ladies.

Talking to the market ladies is actually part of my job description. I am supposed to be integrating into my community, which seems to entail talking to nice ladies, politely refusing marriage proposals, and being fed by people whose goal is always to send you home nice and fat.

The power goes out around 6:30 just as it's getting dark. By candlelight (or headlamplight), I make my dinner, eat aforementioned dinner and take a bucket bath. Remember that cut-up bottle? It makes its second cameo here.

I climb into bed after locking up and tucking in my mosquito net and call it a late night, if I fall asleep after 8:30.

(This may seem a little dry after yesterday's post, but I always want to know the weird details of how people live, when I read stories (how people go to the bathroom, how they bathe and how often, what their underwear would look like, would it relate to how they go to the bathroom? periods, where the food comes from, etc) and thought yall might have similar questions, but be too polite to ask)