30 June, 2010

Relieve me, Rain

It’s hot. I’m sweating profusely as I write this. Any part of my body that touches almost instantly forms a pool of greasy sweat. So, the space where my neck meets my face never gets a break unless I continually look up at the ceiling. My cement room bakes during the hot season and turns into a sauna right before the rains. What about windows, you ask? I have two. One is a window into the storage shed next to my room. The other is 10 feet from the ground, next to the ceiling. It mocks me as I look up at it from my bed every morning. Birds have begun nesting in it so pretty soon it’ll be covered with twigs. The birds wake me with their sing song chirps. It makes me feel like Cinderella, except the mice chew through my clothing instead of hemming me a ball gown. And they don’t dance.

Today my supervisor walked out of his office with a downpour of sweat on him. It looked like someone threw a bucket of water at his face. A very large bucket. I don’t think Africans ever get used to the heat. They just deal with it. Like they do the swarming flies, mosquitoes, and roaches, buses that leave and break down at the will of Allah, and a slew of mechanical problems that Americans solved before the industrial revolution.

The rainy season is here and provides relief from the suffocating West African heat. But it hasn’t rained at my site yet. I’ve been waiting patiently because as they say, in Africa, the clock is always half past 12. I still don’t know what that means.

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