This is not a bitch fest

No Im serious! I was watching the South Park episode about internet the other day and I couldn’t help but laugh my ass off all over again. Besides the fact that I am a huge fan of South Park and all of their commentary fantasticness, if you are or have ever been in Peace Corps you would completely understand the amount of humor that I found as the resident of South Park scramble frantically with their addiction as the internet collapses across America. Actually the amount of humor I find in every episode as the creators of South Park poke fun at acceptable American nuances and social catastrophes that don’t even relate to us here anymore. People find themselves lost and dealing with withdrawals and I found for the first time a completely new perspective as someone who has traded in everything I never knew I took for granted in my last life. The residents of South Park travel west with the hope of finding a land with internet a plenty with the conversations sounding just like the ones Jo and I have some times. We dream of internet for free at the hostel in the capital knowing full well it probably won’t work, or plan to get online sometimes to load a blog knowing full well it may be a three day process between trying to get a time the store is open and combining it with the internet being on. You learn a whole new version of patience if you want to try and gain back some of the things you took for granted before. You load a webpage and could go take a shower before its back up. It’s amazing, and something we talk about often, how much you don’t realize all the things you take for granted on a daily basis in the states. Small things, being able to pee in the morning in a bathroom where the most you may worry about is the ant that has crawled across your bathroom sink. Or the ability to get hungry and have food instantly, to drink water whenever you want, to do your laundry without planning it or thinking about it. Foods, I’m not even going to start on foods, (I still can’t get myself to watch Julia and Julia out of fear) but other things as well, knowing where your stores are that have the things you need, turning on a spicket, walking on carpet or clean floors, picking up the phone on a whim to talk to someone anywhere. And most of all…knowing the news of the world. I just found out yesterday about the oil spill off the gulf coast and Jo and I are still mourning over it. We have no news, have no idea what is going on in the world outside of our town, let alone Madagascar. Our world can get so small until we find the resources to make it larger again. Deciding to sit down and surf the web, flipping through pages, grumbling when it takes 15 sec to load…15 seconds gets us so excited to see here we feel our hopes soar if ever it happens…We fantasize about Time magazine, and thinking of my days perusing through my National Geographics almost makes me cry. I have to laugh at the amount of impatience and expectations I had in the life before this one. These days IF the internet works it may take about 5 min to load a page, 15 to load three pictures. I fetch my water every night, prepare it as I sleep and add bleach while I’m sitting thinking I’d like to have a drink when the bleach is done in 15min. There is no refrigerator, there is no electricity every morning, except Sundays when it doesn’t turn off and then, if I can sleep until 6 or 7, I’m truly lucky. My feet are orange, they won’t change color no matter how many times I want to scrub them clean. I had the opportunity to use a pumice stone (really need one by the way) the other day and I could have scrubbed to my bones and it wouldn’t have mattered. Instead of lighting candles at night to set my mood to relaxation I light mosquito coils and my gas stove to cook my meal. When I begin to get hungry I start to bleach my salads and I gather all my foods for the day in the morning when I go to market. I keep my eye on my tomatoes and carrots because if they rot I’ve lost two days worth of food. Meat is bought in the morning when it’s most fresh, cooked around lunch time and eaten for lunch and dinner; if I even bother as it is both expensive and such a hassle as I wonder if I will be in complete gastrointestinal pain the next day. I walk to town through my market and look in piles of clothes if I need, buy more bleach, buy toilet paper, and sometimes a cold coke (served in glass bottles which are very cheap if you sit and drink them when you buy them). In the mornings the sun rises around 4:30 but I wait until around 5:15 so that the cockroaches that own my house as I sleep have enough time to leave.
Speaking of our local insect population I have definitely noticed a complete desensitization in that department. When I first got her there where many night you could hear my screen or holler out loud as something large flew across my face, crawled up my legs, or my favorite was when I sat talking to a giant cockroach in my shower that wouldn’t leave for at least a good 15 min convinced it would go somewhere while it was most likely convinced that I would go away. I really wanted to take my bucket bath so I eventually started grabbing my shoes and chucking them at the cockroach. Combing my ability to aim from years in water polo and the massive size of the cockroach I won, and my victories have been coming ever since. They fly by the way. I used to keep my hair wrapped in a cloth when I was facing down a new opponent. Two days ago a cockroach crawled up my drain as I was showering. I grabbed the brick in my bath that keeps the mice from crawling in, smashed the cockroach, and pushed it back out the drain while rinsing my hair. I was truly impressed with myself. I now chase mice out of my house with shoes and books and yell at bats as they crawl down my wall wondering where the hell just got themselves into. In my bathroom I watch the geckos that litter the walls waiting for the insects to come out. I even started chasing them across the walls of my kitchen with my finger. I also, sad to say, have had many conversations with my local gecko population and while I would love to say I have conquered my fear of spiders but that is just not possible. The spiders here are huge. That is all. But my days of hairspraying spiders the size of dimes from across the room and waiting for their death is over… I don’t have any hairspray. Instead I take my broom and squish spiders larger than quarters into the wall. But there are still a few I have kept around because they are very useful and they do eat so many of the amazing things that are still crawling all over my house.
And sometimes I just shrug. And that’s all I have to say to everything going on, I laugh, I smile, or I shrug. There’s really no better response to life that can be found.