[28] this post is about underwear

My mind is a very unfortunate blank this evening. This is the apparent result of too much play and too little work. A four day weekend is turning my brain to utter mush. 

I have resorted to blindly glancing through photos on my computer, hoping to find something, anything, of interest. 

There wasn't anything, really. I did find this:

Okay, that is perhaps interesting only to me. That is my tukul in Southern Sudan. I lived in that miniature house for three months. I would show you a picture of the inside, but 1. there is a logo that would give away who I worked for, ruining my pleasing fantasy of anonymity, and 2. there is nothing to see. This tukul contained the following things, while I lived in it: bed (with mosquito net), two plastic chairs, one teetering camping table, one fan that kept breaking, and two suitcases, in which most of my stuff stayed. It felt like a major life-enhancing change the day I got around to hanging a clothesline so I could dry my underwear somewhere other than on the arms of the chairs.

Here's a thing about Africa: you wash your own undergarments. Everyone does. Underwear is dirty, so you cannot ask someone else to touch it. It would be terribly rude. In Southern Sudan, we had women washing our clothes by hand, and they washed everything but the undergarments (they were not pleased with the shorts I wore to bed, either, thinking they were underwear despite some ineffective cross-language attempted communication). I washed mine in the shower, and then hung them about my room, a strategy that only took me, oh, two years in various countries to figure out. Always before I had a big underwear-washing party periodically. Except in Rwanda, where somehow I managed complete oblivion to the whole concept. The lady who helped me keep my house and myself in some semblance of cleanliness (more than full-time work and hand-washing clothes are incompatible occupations) was kind enough to wash my underwear as well. I'm not sure if she did it because she figured I was clearly completely inept, or if she was just incredibly nice. (I was completely inept, by the way. I still have not figured out how that weird mop-substitute floor cleaning mechanism they use in Rwanda works. It's like a big rubber squeegee that you use on your windshield. Only for the floor.)