I mentioned a couple of weeks back that baby Dorca was helping me with my laundry. It was way fun at first and super cute. She would hold my bar of soap as I would rinse and wring out my clothes. Yes, we suds up our clothes with bars of soap and then wash them by hand. Well, last week Dorca turned from cute to not so helpful. I had all my clothes washed and had pulled them all from the bucket of clean water they were rinsing in, had wrung them out, and took about half of them over to the clothesline. When I came back, she had all of my clean clothes in the first bucket of muddy dirty water and proudly exclaimed “TJ, I’m washing clothes!”.
Not including the time it takes to rewash half my clothes, it is a little unnerving that it takes longer to wash my clothes than it does for them to dry. And we’re not even to the hot season yet.
Right now I have a splitting headache because the neighbors are burning all their leaves/pollen/garbage and it smells like Hempfest back in Seattle. While its not relaxing, I am extremely paranoid and have the munchies.
For some reason, all the kids here in our orphanage call each other “Johnny”. It took me a while to figure out just what they were saying, it took me a little longer to figure out that it’s the equivalent of calling somebody “bro” if you’re in a fraternity. It took me even longer to discover the reason behind this phrase.
That’s right. They lifted it right of one of the dozens of water tubs we use for cooking, laundry, showers, anything. They get a ‘C’ for effort but an ‘A+’ overall because I’ve even heard their friends at school say it.
Its very endearing, and a little creepy, that it seems everybody in the orphanage knows where I am at ALL times. It’s mainly because they love me and want to know what I’m up to, but I can ask anybody to tell me everything I’ve done in the last 24hrs and even if they weren’t here for it they’ll have already gotten the info from another person and tell me exactly where I’ve been. For instance, every time I have to run into the city for something unexpected as soon as I return there’s a mob of people wondering where I’ve been and if everything turned out allright.
They also know when something is wrong too. Take today for example. Right in the middle of church I started feeling like my body was trying to destroy itself. I broke out in a cold sweat, got very dizzy, and had a fever coming on. I excused myself and had Christina drive me back home before I passed out. Once there I laid down in my bed and just tried to wait for it to pass. Gabriel helped move a fan into my room to try to help, and that was the only contact with anybody I had. Several hours later I made my way out to get some water and everybody was asking me how my fever was. It turns out what happened was Victor, Christina and I went to a graduation party for his cousin the night before and had gotten some bad food. Shortly after church Victor started feeling sick as well and we both have the same stomach bug. Christina didn’t eat because she was busy with Yohani, and so she’s fine. Serves us right. We’re both better, by the way.
Check back on Tuesday to read about part one of the British Invasion. Just in case you missed it, that’s Tuesday. Unless an emergency happens, or there’s riots in the city, or a soccer game on TV, or we get invaded by locusts, or the electricity goes out for a week again. And also if the entire of Sub-Saharan Africa loses internet for an entire month –something which has happened three times in the last year but has never made the news (presumably because the internet wasn’t working to email the story to news outlets).
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