Different Thinking

A Delight climbed one of the palm trees,
using its small rough protruding segments.

Here are a few things that have highlighted to me the way we are conditioned to think differently in the small things from living in a different place in the world than where we grew up. This year when it was time to return to the Sahel, the biggest thing on my mind was: I am going to spend the rest of the year wearing skirts. This is a strange thought because I actually really enjoy wearing my skirts in Niger and I often think I will wear more skirts when I go back to the US, but often don’t. But that was the change my mind was focused on.

We spent most of today without electricity. The moment it turned off I was in the kitchen, but I knew right away. The refrigerator stopped running. How often when your frig motor turns off in the US do you wonder if that is a sign your electric has turned off? I have never had that thought there!

Our friends who are also from the US came over this week. They were commenting on the palm trees in our area. It is true, our windows have bars and screens and if you look out a couple of them, there are palm trees, blue sky and lizards. From the US point of view, the scenery might automatically make you feel like you’re on a Caribbean resort island (when you only take a small view out the window:)

And that got me thinking of some of the bigger differences in household things. Many of them we have shared and are very common when traveling in majority-world countries. You can’t drink out of the tap. Driving is crazier than a video game. All the food is made from scratch. If church goes long, it might be a 6 hour church service. But some we may not have shared that have recently hit us hard. Saturday is our new varmint day. We have on our to do list setting mouse traps and putting out ant and cockroach poison. In addition, redoing any duct tape at the corners of the ceiling to keep all the animal nest debris from falling out of the ceiling. 

Easy Teasy on the tile floor.

The tile floors have stood out recently too. As Easy-Teasy is moving around more, he is getting hurt more and we have to wonder about concussions with these tile floors on his head! Of course we try to be very careful and protect his head, but from time to time babies turning to toddlers fall… 

Of course we have DIY projects, but now in addition we have an overwhelming number of FIY - Fix It Yourself projects. Cell phones, computers – whatever we have cannot be easily replaced here. Even if there are some repair people out there for computers, it’s hard to know who could you trust to be competent and honest about the problem? So, El Padre gets online and figures it out. One cell is down for the count, but the other one and the computer are back in business!

-- La Maestra