Team Life: The Untold Story

I am always the first one up in the morning, but I generally like early mornings because they are calm and peaceful and I have time to be alone with myself and drink my coffee, enjoy the sunrise and think. I have always been like this. How I survived a childhood waking up to 6 loud siblings I will never know, but now I know it was a small victory on my part given my true nature.

Now that I have painted an idylic picture of my morning and even given you an actual picture of the view from our compound, let me describe the scene in a more real way. First, there are birds chirping all around in the jungle surrounding us, and were it not for the generator noise, I would actually be able to hear them!

Sitting at the table enjoying my coffee, little tiny ants start to crawl on me because they have come overnight to look for bits of crumbs we left behind from dinner, but who can blame them? The security guards make constant rounds checking for intruders – not really of human variety, but more snakes, scorpions, giant spiders and anything else that might put us in peril.

Beside the compound there is a trail that leads up to the jungle where there is a ‘spring’ of sorts. I hesitate to call it a spring but let’s do that for the sake of simplicity. The fence around the compund is made of tall bamboo standing next to each other. So it is possible for people to sort of see in at just the right angle. At any rate, we can hear the villagers passing by with their buckets heading to the spring. It is generally children. This morning, one boy was using his bucket as a drum as he passed by to fetch water. On the upside, it drowned out the generator for a minute! Drumming is far preferable to the “hello! hello! hello!” we constantly hear during lunch or whenever we are sitting at the table during the day, as they peer through the slats. We can’t respond back because once we do it would never end!

At this moment, it is a balmy 23 celsius (75ish) and perfectly comfortable. By the time I finish this, it will have gone up at least by 10 and I will be a sweaty mess for the remainder of the day. There is no sleeping in because it gets clausterphobic after about 9am, although some people in the house manage to sleep past 10a on weekends and I admire them. They likely had more alcohol in their system than I did when they went to bed. We are all usually up by 7:30 for work at 8 during the week. If we want to do anything fun on the weekend, like hike in the jungle or go down to the river, we have to do it early in day or later in the afternoon because mid-day is just a recipe for sunstroke. None of us can do it. The sun goes down around 6:30 or 7 every night, so we can’t stay out late.

At some point, the sun gets high enough in the sky to use the solar and they can turn the generator off. When we have movie night and project from laptop to the sheet on the wall, we have to use subtitles, not because of any language barriers but because we can usually barely hear the dialogue over the hum of the generator. So basically when we want to enjoy ourselves and relax on the veranda, early morning and in the evening, we have to compete with the generator.

When I first arrived, we were flushing the toilets with buckets of water, which is pretty normal for this kind of environment. But at some point, someone decided we needed an upgrade and the handyman made it so the flushing mechanism would work on the toilets. I would say we each got a flush or two in before both of them had broken handles. The handles are just not sturdy enough and you can feel it as soon as you use it. So we are back to bucket flushing, which for me, isn’t an issue. We have more pressing things to be concerned about.

Then there is the neverending saga of my room; the love-hate relationship, shall we say, that I have with it and its contents. My room is small, which is fine but it is the smallest, by far of all the rooms in this house and in city house. To give you perspective, all the rooms have a full sized bed, armoire, bedside table (some have one on each side!) and a desk. And even with all of these things, there is still plenty of room to say, do yoga or something. Mine, not so much. I can only dream of a desk. Even if there was one available, it would not fit. Still fine though! When I arrived, I had no bedside table, a mosquito net with holes and no hangers. Okay, all fixable with time. It took about 5 days to get a new net. Here, you can’t just go pull one off of the supply shelf, everything is inventoried. You need to fill out a request form, submit, they process, they get the net, air out and then you come home from work one day and magically it is there! Wonderful. On to the bedside table. Same deal only without the airing out. The only caveat is, if there isn’t an actual unused bedside table, the carpenter has to make one! (no Ikea or Wayfair here). But this crew was sympathetic to my plight and someone brought me a wooden chair from the other house to use as a table. Fine. I’m happy.

And then the day the white dust started to appear all over my things inside the armoire. I won’t leave you in suspense – termites. So I inform supply, again they ask me to fill out a request form. I pack all my things up because I know they need to take the armoire. A few days go by and finally I see the armoire in the backyard being taken apart and treated, I know the end is near. It is getting tiresome living out of my backpack continually digging around to find what I need, I just want to unpack.

I finally get my armoire back after several days. I can be happy. Room, chair/bedside table, armoire and I even scored a few hangers. Ahh. I go to open the armoire and it almost topples over on me! WTH? I stablize it. Look at it. It is squarely on the ground, doesn’t rock when the doors are closed but when you try to open it, yikes! And it’s big! So reluctantly I call the supply guy, who conveniently lives in the room across the hall. I ask him to check it out. We determine that the handyman took the wooden back panel off the armoire and replaced it with a light pressed board. The laws of physics did not appreciate this. As a temporary solution, we got some rocks and pushed them under the front of the armoire to keep it from toppeling over – desperate times… It was going into a long weekend and nothing would be fixed anytime soon. Fine. I’m flexible, this is West Africa.

So the cleaner cleans our rooms every day. When she does, she sweeps and mops. Delightful! – except if you have little rocks stablizing your armoire that get dislodged by her mop every. single. day.

DANGER!

As I write, the rocks are still there. Every day I come home and have to remember to check for them and make sure they are placed correctly before I open the armoire. At night, I lie in bed and have visions of the entire thing coming down on me in my sleep. I informed supply guy that if this happens, under no circumstance should this be put on my death report! I won’t be taken out in the jungles of Africa by an armoire! Black Mamba, hemorrhagic fever, hippo attack – anything but death by armoire! Nervously he agrees.

That same day, as I am changing after my shower, I have the door of my tiny hot room closed. I notice the armoire has a new laquer finish and that whatever toxic substance they coated it with, smells to high heaven. My entire room is filled with the fumes. I blast my fan, I open my door, I make sure the widow is wide open and I retreat outside, hoping it is fume free enough by bedtime so that I can sleep.

Speaking of sleep, my room is situated in the front corner of the house. The windows are feet from the guard stand. They are there 24/7. They are not allowed to sleep at night, so guess what they do? Yes, music and videos and other things on their phones. It is quite a delight. The trucks, 3 of them, are also parked right there, along with at least 2 motorcycles. So if there is a rare movement in the night, they will fire up the Land Rover and there is no sleeping through that. Then even if they are quiet, there is always the random baby goat making noise, or child crying in the distance. Yes, I could close the window but then I am in a hot, clausterphobic, fume filled, temite infested danger box and who will hear me scream when the armoire comes down? Anyway, even with the windows closed, there is still a lot to be heard, so it isn’t worth it to not have the air.

One day last week, I came home to find a fine white powder on a pair of shoes I has tucked under my chair/bedside table. You got it! TERMITES! And the saga continues. I refuse to change rooms at this point because I will not be vanquished by a room and its contents! Plus, my room has a nice view of the sunrise and mountains in the distance and no other room has that, so I am holding on to the positives. I also know I could be somewhere more heinous next mission and it could make this room look like a palace! I imagine a day when I will be longing for the comfort of this room as I sleep in a hot tent, on a pad on the ground with a storage locker that won’t kill me, keeping my posessions safe.

The positive side is that I get to share my days with a small team of expats from all over the globe. They have all been here for varying degrees of time and will stay varying degrees. One person has already left after a year and his replacement will come in a week or 2. Another is leaving later this week. Currently, I will be the only one left of this team by the time I leave in late December. I will have a lot of ‘goodbyes’ before I say mine.

Sitting down for meals is like having a small UN meeting. I get to listen to everyone speaking my language with their unique versions of word prounciatons; it is a beautiful euphony of accents. And everyone is multilingual. Arabic, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish and various tribal languages learned over previous missions. It is rather impressive. So when someone new comes, it is like opening a present. What new, fun, exciting thing do they bring to the table?

I expect to have a little time to write later this week about maternity care, as we have Wednesday off because it is a national holiday. Inshallah, as they say here, unless I am take out by my armoire.