a day late, again

The mosquitoes were vicious last night, as if they knew that the wind and rain would blow them all away in the dark. All night, the wind blew the reed matting against the wall behind my bed. I kept waking up to whooshing gusts of wind and crashing sounds. I thought to myself, “Well, the mat will probably come crashing in through the window and topple the mosquito net.” But I was too sleepy to care.

When I stepped out into the morning, the sun was bright and eager, up far too early. The breeze was no longer cold or angry, just pleasant. I would use the phrase “washed clean” to describe the morning, but I cannot quite use such a phrase to describe this yard of dirt and drying, cracking mud. Still, the sun and the breeze and the fields of sorghum were beautiful. Perfect.

The bread was full of crunchy bits this morning. Not good crunchy bits. I would say probably sand, which is at least better than bugs. I can crunch my way through some sand, but not through bugs. I’m not that hardcore. After enough bites of crunchy bread to wash down my vitamins (minus the multivitamin, which I have discovered was causing heartburn in a major way and had made me miserable for my first week here), I drank down two cups of drinking chocolate and called that breakfast.

Our office is in use for a meeting that I don’t need to be in, so I’m sitting under the porch of my little room. I get a lot more breeze this way, but I usually prefer not to work where I sleep. Pretty soon everything and nothing becomes work. Our compound is, counterclockwise from the gate, three little rectangular houses of one room each, a new rectangular building that will be two rooms, a round thatched tukul for a kitchen, and two more rectangular buildings that serve as the mess hall and the storeroom. Oh, and a bigger rectangular office building with windows bizarrely placed so high on the walls that they do not offer any breeze but the rain still comes pouring in. But that’s sort of off by itself.

We are surrounded by groups of tukuls and an occasional patch of crops. The road to the compound is a cow path and so deep in mud that the driver seems to get stuck every single time.

I came here with many things that I don’t need, including the blue metal loop that I used for keys in New York. I was expecting to have some keys. I don’t. We don’t lock our rooms, ever, although I have a little latch on the inside that I use to keep the door all the way closed at night (otherwise the dogs love a dry place to sleep). Stealing, I was informed on arrival, is not a part of the culture here. We do lock the office at night (actually, if you close those doors, they lock), but the keys are passed around to whoever needs them and I don’t have my own.

Yesterday in the car coming back from the training I attended, we carried my coworker’s wife and baby son, who reminded me of my babysittee, T. They actually look nothing alike, but he was almost exactly the age that T was when I left New York – starting to wave and wanting to gnaw on everything in sight. When he got into the car, he stared at me with huge, face-filling eyes and cried when someone passed him to me. I am totally the wrong color. By the end of the ride, he was sitting happily on my lap, trying to eat the headrest of the seat in front of me. We stopped for sodas and another coworker fed him little sips of mango Vita in the bottle’s cap. He was very quickly converted to sugar and fake fruit flavor and complained whenever the sips stopped coming. By the time he and his mother got out of the car, he was soaked in mango soda from collar to shoes.

The afternoon thunder is beginning in the west. The sky overhead is clear and flawless, but towers of clouds are beginning to threaten the blue. It is so bright at midday that I can hardly look directly at the world.

The flies are circling again, trying to get in a few good contaminations before the rain. What is the point of flies? I’m sure they have one, maybe, I don’t know, helping with biodegrading? Keeping the germs alive? But it’s really gross that they sit on poo of all kinds and then aim for your mouth. Yick.

Sprinkles of rain on my ‘puter.