I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sinks. I really miss sinks. They are very practical…they are nice to wash your hands in, or your face, or to brush your teeth, and water is always neatly collected in the basin and drain. I’m perfectly happy, not lacking in anything, and do not need sinks to be happy…but I will definitely appreciate them more when I get back to the states.
It’s amazing how quickly and completely the human mind is capable of adapting to a new concept of normalcy for everyday life. It’s normal to wear a skirt and cover my head when I leave the house. There is nothing strange about dirt roads and the necessity to seek out the most compact, firm looking mud when navigating said dirt (mud) road after it has rained…and I seem to be developing a sixth sense to know when a moto or bicycle is coming fast behind me to pass through on the same narrow strip of passable road that I am walking on. I have learned to bike following the rules of the road Chadian style: if you are bigger and faster, you have the right of way. I bike around the women carrying peanuts or tomatoes on their heads to market, I bike around the boys pushing large wheel barrow type things down the road, I bike around the slow bikes….save for these reasons, I stay as close to the edge of the road as possible. I yield to let the motos pass and we all move aside to let a vehicle or truck pass through. If there are two cars at once going opposite directions sometimes we even stop. I have replaced traffic lanes, stop sign and stop lights with one general rule: if something bigger and faster is coming at me…move…..fast. Yet, this now seems very normal. It is normal to shake everyone’s hand when I enter a room. It is normal to leave for an event when it is time to be there. It is normal for the power to be out more often than it is on. It is normal to sweat.
I find myself thinking about things in the “developed” world almost as if they were dreams…and never reality. From time to time pictures of things like interstates and sidewalks pop into my head. I consider them like a child considers an imaginary world…they seem very foreign now because I have a new normal. While I may miss sinks, it’s only because I still encounter them on occasion here. There is a sink at Rose’s house. Until I used it I didn’t think about sinks. Similarly, I hadn’t thought about how my appearance might have changed to fit my new normal…until I saw my picture on my MCC prayer card. I looked at it, then showed it to Rose. We were both shocked at how clean I looked…not that I’m not clean here…maybe polished is a better word. I’m already so removed from the normalcy of my US life it is interesting to consider what I will feel like in ten months when I am heading back to the states.
All this to say, Chad is quickly becoming my home. There are things here that could be helped…like the lack of sewers, and lack of any type of public sanitation, but there are also things that are simply a new normal. I might miss sinks when I am reminded of them…but I don’t need them. I think we in the “developed” world look at a place like Chad and see a disaster. It’s not a disaster. It’s just a place with some problems, some differences, and a lot of incredible people living their lives in the normalcy that they know….and now, the normalcy that I know.
Some new things…
*I acted as a human food processor and helped my sisters pound meat, some kind of grain/flour, and vegetables together in a life-sized mortar pestle type thing
*I started teaching English Classes. I am teaching two classes: Beginner 2 and Intermediate Low 1. It’s exhausting…but going well so far.
*I had an outfit made…and I think it’s pretty legit :)
*I successfully biked home, in a skirt, after a three-hour-long rainstorm…I wasn’t even that muddy when I got there
Love you all.
