The Long and Winding Road

Cleaning mold off the ceiling.

We have quickly been reminded of the intensity of life in the Sahel. Everything is so slow, often inconvenient, takes so much time and doesn’t happen until tomorrow. It took spending a week in the capital in order to get our car repaired and road-ready. Before that, on the first full morning back, we started driving our car and quickly found out we had no brakes. This is when you are very grateful to be driving on a small, slow, very bumpy dirt road instead of down a western PA hill!

That afternoon was spent getting finding a close mechanic to work on the brakes. The following day we drove the car to our mechanic of choice and found out it was too much to do on a Friday, so we would have to stay the weekend and it probably wouldn’t be finished until Tuesday meaning we had to spend a week at the capital! But we felt good about the mechanic and his proposed fixes being even somewhat preventative, so we waited it out. Unfortunately even with all that time waiting our car wouldn’t have AC before our drive to The Ville because of a rain storm passing through the night before and closing down the AC mechanic’s shop/work area. We are grateful all our waiting helped to make the 10 hour trip without car problems, safely and even with helpful AM clouds to keep the car cooler without AC!

It was great to finally be home to greet our neighbors and friends and start unpacking. Greeting our neighbors and giving them a gift is a very big deal and has to be a priority. We soon found out it takes a lot of work to get your house back up to speed. It felt like everywhere we looked a fix needed to be done on the house. The biggest problem was mold in the children’s room and a bathroom due to a leaky roof and a shut up house. So we set them up sleeping with mosquito nets in the living room, where they still are sleeping, as it has yet to be fully resolved. In addition, ants had eaten through our closet, creating a huge clean up job. Screens had holes in them and some of them needed to be re-sewn. Some windows have two separate sections of screen to cover the whole opening and if they are not sewn together it defeats the purpose, which doesn’t occur to the locals because 99% of them live with wide open windows and doors.

The closet re-organized after termite cleaning.

Then the list goes on, the school room bookshelf had mold and had to be cleaned and parts repainted. Then closets and school room reorganized. Smaller things add up too, like rehanging posters, cleaning up after dust storms, catching mice and starting internet to name a few, some of which can take a longer time than one expects here. Michael has made some new shelves and a shoe rack with some boards that were discarded after construction. And all these things were done without our regular help assisting with market runs, washing laundry by hand and cleaning our home, since our part-time house helper was unable to come these two weeks. Someone came in to work on our gutter and to fix the rain dripping on to our ceiling and walls. We hope the only big job left is the mold. We forgot it would take so long with so many surprises, but we are glad this month of transition is behind us and we are feeling some routine and starting to get rested. It’s amazing to me to think we already have two weeks of clean-up work, 8 days of school, and 12 nights of playing outside with the neighbors under our belts and are starting to fall into the more normal flow!

--La Maestra