Home Improvement and Witchcraft

I FINALLY MOVED!!!

After three months of waiting and quilting and bothering my postmate, I finally moved into my very own home. I put down my plastic rugs and slapped down my mattress and swept and mopped and mopped and swept!

Then, my friend, Solange, came over with her children and extended family to see if I needed any help. That's when the trouble really began. She told me the power was on, so I got really excited, because guess who has a fridge?! Posh Corps! ....but....the lights were on, but no current was passing (as we volunteers say in our weird translated from French English). None of the outlets worked. NONE OF THEM!!! I did the grown-up thing and laid on my floor and pouted and then did some more mopping and sweeping.

Jon came over later that day to help me connect my stove to my gas bottle via the too-small tube. We royally failed after more than an hour of clamping and wiggling and rolling of eyes and gnashing of teeth. My friend, Pamela,  tried to comfort me by telling me that I had the worst luck of anyone she knew, but that it would get better.

I put my sorrow and despair into a constructive project - I regrouted my whole house, because while I was cleaning paint off my floor (and getting high off the fumes), I managed to get eaten alive by microscopic tiny ants called Canadians.

I later found out the reason that I have an ant problem is because of a woman, who used to live in the neighborhood. She went into the underworld and brought back a bag of ants. Yep, the reason that I have a pest problem is sorcelry. There are a few ways to combat sorcelery in the East - be really religious, keep one particular breed of chicken or eat a cat or a dog. Apparently, you eat cat or dog as a remedy; if you are having nightmares, it's possible that someone is trying to make you their zombie, but if you had dog or cat for dinner, they can only call the cat's or dog's soul and you'll be fine.

After a night spent wishing I had the neck-feather-less chickens, I spent a day unpacking and attempting to get a hold of Major, the guy who doesn't direct the construction of my house. Then, Solange came through again and after her neighbors put my guest bed together, they came to look at my electricity. After 4 days in my house, many trips to Jon's  house to charge things and much weeping and wailing, my electricity works!

And a few days later, the only thing left to finish my bed room is to make curtains and I am a boss at making curtains. I sleep in a bed. When I remember that a fridge is for keeping food good for longer, I have food in my fridge, which is cold. I can change locks, I can put in screens (kinda), I can put together beds and screw in light bulbs. I can attach gas bottles to stoves, I can make the best banana bread ever and really delicious black-eyed peas and I can even sometimes flush my toilet.

Side note: Guess who has amoebas? One more thing to cross off my Cameroon bucket list!

What I've been up to

Nothing much. The end.

Sadly, this is not too far from the truth. I finally got back to Dimako the first full week of January just in time to teach. I delayed my return till the last minute not because I didn't want to go to post, but because my house isn't ready.

I've been looking for a house almost since I got to post in August. I finally found one in late November and got it approved. Peace Corps paid 6 months rent in advance, so that they had the money to finish up the house. It needed the bathroom to be finished up, a couple light fixtures installed, a wall around the compound and a roof for the latrine. The money should have been a gracious plenty for all of that to get done and only the wall would take a long time, but today is January 26th and I still am not in my house. 

I've been living in my postmate's house for the past two weeks. It's been very relaxing to be in a house with a fridge/freezer, a stove and furniture. It's really made me want to get my house done even more, but in the two weeks plus that I've been back, the only progress that's been made is a really big pit to drain my shower room, glass being added to one window and finding out that the house needs to be rewired.

My postmate, Jon, and I have a pretty good relationship, but I'm worried that when he gets back from his travels (he's been gone almost this whole time), I'm going to wear out my welcome. I would just really like to move and be done with it.

In the meantime, I've been teaching my 2 classes (having recently dropped one, because we got yet another English teacher at my school), watching a lot of movies, reading, and being so bored that I exercise twice a day. It's getting unhealthy. No one should be that bored, but when your laundry is all clean and so is the house and everything is organized and your papers are graded and your letters all answered, what else can you do?!

I think that I'm getting deeper into crazy-cat-ladydom. I spend a good amount of my time just watching George. He found a mouse outside and brought it in to play with and I thought it was really cute that he was batting around the tiny mouse corpse and then swallowed it whole. Do you see what I mean?!

Hopefully, I'll be moving soon, so I can get back into gardening and less into cat-watching. If anyone has any small entertainment ideas, send them my way! I've got stuff for quilting (Thanks, Jackie!), so maybe when I come back, I'll have a bad-ass pagne quilt and my sanity! I've rediscovered that I'm very good at solitaire and napping.