also a day late

For reasons of excessive rain and storming, I missed a very important call about 45 minutes ago. “Missed” means it didn’t come through. At all. I stood at the edge of my little patio (dirt, flooded) in my raincoat and rubber boots and pointed the satellite phone at the sky, hoping. It showed network, but no call came.

In another example of how technology hates me, I offer the following anecdote: the warranty on my laptop ran out last week. As of yesterday, I have a line of pixels that do not light up, right across the taskbar at the bottom of my screen. Do they purposely make laptops to die at the instant the three years of warranty expire? If so, I’m impressed by the accuracy with which it happens.

Before? When I mentioned cows “lowing”? (Grammar people, help me: I have heard that the punctuation is always supposed to go within the quotation marks. But what about here, where it just looks wrong, because it’s not part of the quotation? Am I in disregard of grammatical rules if I put the question mark outside? Or was the person who told me that wrong?)

Anyway, when I mentioned cows lowing, before, I was not exactly scrupulously accurate. Lowing sounded pleasant, so I said that, because it was a pleasant evening scene. And, you know, “the cattle are lowing, the baby awakes…” What the cows really do is moan loudly and painfully, as if they are giving birth and the calf is stuck. They do this ALL. THE. TIME. It’s like living in a den of dying animals. Only they don’t die, and they don’t stop, and you can’t club them over the head to make them stop. (Not that I would ever hurt an animal. Ever. I’m just saying, you can’t make them stop.)

As I was writing that, my battery died and I had to pack up and head back over to the office because I couldn’t plug the computer in at my room because! The plug is a power strip, outside, under the porch, and currently lying in some water. Don’t worry, I turned the outlet off. And moved the power strip out of the puddle area. But it’s still awfully damp, and the last thing I need in TLT – okay, second to last thing – is to be electrocuted. The last thing I need is a snake bite.

Still raining; still no call (although someone just tried, and it didn’t come through), so I will keep writing. Offline. Hoping that someday we will have enough electricity to power the internet.

I hate snakes. I was talking with a European colleague (EC) about snakes and EC said, “But even the dangerous ones look harmless.” You can say this when you grew up in a place where the snakes are largely harmless. No one who grew up in Africa would say this. To me, even the harmless ones look dangerous.

I also hate spiders. Especially the huge palm-sized flat ones with the big bodies and the hairy legs. In Liberia last summer, we killed these on sight. I mean, when I saw one, I made C kill it while I squealed in the living room. Here, I have negotiated an agreement with them. They eat the mosquitoes and stay far away from me; I let them live. Easy-peasy. It turns out that I hate the mosquitoes that bite me more than I hate the spiders that just sit there looking scary and eating the mosquitoes. I still check my bed for them before I (get in and tuck the mosquito net securely around me and) sleep, though. Can you imagine? A spider crawling on you IN THE DARK? WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE IT? YOU CAN ONLY FEEL IT? Not okay.

Now you are all wondering how I ever ended up in Africa if I can’t handle the spiders or the snakes. Obviously I can handle them, I can go about my day despite their presence, or I wouldn’t be here. That doesn’t mean I have to like them. I like Africa. I like people. I like the work I get to do here. No one said I had to like the critters.