Memories of Africa
This morning, as I took a shower, something about the smell of the water invoked a vivid memory of Kenya. In 1999, I spent a semester living in a banda (thatched roof hut) on a game ranch with a couple dozen fellow students. Part of the experience was wonderful, and parts of it were quite horrible. I suffered from the worst depression of my life, partially due to the anti-malarial drug that I was taking at the time. I have a tendency to remember the bad things more than the good things, so this recollection that hit me this morning seemed like good blog fodder. You all like exotic stories of foreign travels, right?
At camp, we did not have basic amenities like plumbing or consistent electricity. (We had electricity from a generator for a few hours a day so we could write assignments on the 486 computers in the library/computer lab. I spent a lot of time in there). We had a phone, but the giraffes frequently walked through the line and took the phone out for weeks at a time. Cell phones hadn't quite exploded there yet. Anyway, one thing that was difficult to get used to was the idea of bathing outdoors.
The camp had outdoor showers that were basically giant buckets with holes in them, with a pull system, surrounded by four hole-ridden flimsy wooden walls that started at the knees and stopped just about 6 feet off the ground. You filled the bucket with water, hoisted it above your head with the rope and pulley. and scrubbed as fast as you can, hoping to be done before you ran out of water. To fill the bucket, you carted a ten galon bucket across the camp a bucket from a large rusted boiler that looked to be about a hundred years old. It was heated by a wood fire that camp employees constantly fed.
It's a very strange feeling, to have the open sky over your head and a warm breeze blowing when you try to bathe. The water attracted wasps, which I am allergic to, so my bathing became a kind of awkward dance. Avoid the wasps, fill the bucket. Dodge another wasp, and hoist the bucket over my head. Open the tap, and start scrubbing--look out, a wasp the size of your eye ahhhhh goddon'tstingme! The water was scalding hot, but felt like liquid sex. Showering was the simple pleasure that I could count on to relax me and take me away from my problems. Despite the wasps.
Hygiene was a mixed bag in camp. I probably only showered every third days, but that was often compared to some of the others. I remember at least a couple of people who competed to see how long they could go without taking a shower. The real reason, I think, was a fear of using the outdoor showers, but they never admitted it. They went over a month without fully bathing. We all smelled awful all the time, so I never noticed anyone smelling worse than anyone else. One thing you cannot convey about the savannah, that simply must be experienced, is the sheer volume of shit that is everywhere. Finding a patch of ground that doesn't have some kind of dung on it is impossible. Your sense of smell just kind of blocks it all out after a while.
The other bathing related problem we had was more of a hand-washing issue. We had several hand-washing stations with actual running tap water piped from the well (all our water was well water, thankfully). The hand-washing stations each had a bar of soap. The problem was, the soap kept disappearing, until finally, we caught the culprit in the act-- ostriches were eating the soap, drawn to its fatty content, I suspect. We made makeshift cages for the bars of soap, and that ended that particular ostrich problem. The other ostrich problem was that they were too acclimated to our presence and often wandered frighteningly close to you. An ostrich can gut you from stem to stern with a kick. You haven't known fear until you've laid flat on the ground (to provide less kicking surface area) and been surrounded by half a dozen pissed off ostriches. At one point, I was cornered for half an hour at the edge of the camp where I had been reading, before someone caught sight of my situation and made noises to chase the bastards away.
Next time, I'll tell you about the vervet monkeys. Oh god, the monkeys.