minor challenges

So the past 4 days or so we've been without running water. As I so simply said before in my last post, "oh not a problem" there's a well in the front courtyard. It's really not that huge of a problem, it just takes me 3 times as long to do anything. The water's not that clean, so I'll boil it first. To filter the water to drink, I have to wait for it to cool down again. Bucket baths, bucket dish washing, bucket toilet flushing, etc etc, you get the picture.

It did come back on yesterday though! And then there was a huge storm last night that blew out the electricity. It gets dark here at 6:30, really dark. No electricity, no problem, other volunteers live without it all the time. Only difference is that they're prepared for it. I search around for my flashlights, remembered that I think i've lost half of them already, but find one! Turn it on and a couple seconds the batteries die. Instinctively I search for the tv remote to raid the batteries and I remember I don't own a tv. I've got a canteen though, but no kerosine. So in the dark I found one candle in the bottom of my luggage and then my trusty wind up flashlight. I heard from our neighbor that hopefully it will be back on in a few days because the transmitter broke or something along those lines. Most people don't have generators just because they're so expensive and gas isn't cheap either.

Anyway, the best part of the wind up flashlight, well first of all it was a going away gift. And a wonderful one at that! So I brought this rather large windup operation out into town the other night, and my cameroonian friends LOVED IT. We were sitting there talking, and they were just cranking it up (charging it) which is kind of work. But they were determinded to see the green light come on significating that it's fully charged. They think it's entertaining, I think it's beneficial. Then I said I had the adapters to it to charged phones, and they started winding it up even faster.. until the handle broke off. LOL. Everything here is fixable by superglue, I'm really not worried about it, at all. Rechargable anything is still wonderful.

Final challenge of the week/my life here is trying to act like I belong here. When you're visiting/living in a foreign country it's best too put on that "blank expression of competent invisablitly.. which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everwhere" I stole that part from a book I'm reading because I think it summed it up pretty nicely. I have to pretend to look like I'm not lost when I have no idea where I am. I need to take that shocked expression off my face when I ask "what's menu du jour?" and they say "monkey". First of all because it's rude to look like digusted and secondly I'll really look foreign. It's almost unnatural to not look people in the eyes when I'm walking down the street but it only causes more comments or invitations for remarks. It's hard walking with determination and calmness when this city seems so busy and unstructured.

Day by day, little by litte. In swahili, Haba na haba, hujaza kibaba. In french peu a peu. In pidgeon, small small catch monkey... I'll get better.