This last week has been interesting, to say the least, as the water has been off since last Saturday. Although I brag about the strange fun I find in trying to see how long I can go without a shower, it is considerably less entertaining when I am unable to shower not because I choose to refrain but rather because it is simply not possible with no running water and a reserve bucket that ran dry after day three. Never before have I ever jumped out of bed in the middle of the night upon hearing torrential downpour rains, scrambling to line buckets and jugs under my balcony eaves so as to get whatever dripped off of the roof in some hopeful amount that might be useful the next day. Day four even found me on my balcony “showering” (aka standing in my swimsuit holding my arms and legs out into the rain to do a freshwater cleansing session).
There are days when circumstances of living in a Third World country feel overwhelming again, and all I keep thinking about is how much I just want things to work – no hangups, no unknowns, no plan C's through F's, none of it. It's hard to not to continuously find myself comparing TZ and MN. Life is a lot easier in many ways back in the States that cannot just be attributed to, “It's all we've ever known so we're comfortable with it.” Compared to millions of families here, a majority of people in the U.S. have everything and then some, but here, we foreigners are learning in a very small sense what living in necessity is like - to have to make exceptions on a daily basis, to go the extra three miles, to substitute and hoard, to be laughed at or humiliated for our privileged ignorance.
Coming from a home existence which is privileged beyond belief just in what we know of as the simple, day to day routine – i.e. having a bowl of cereal, checking your email, driving to the store, finding exactly what you need at a good price, coming home to free safe drinking water, air conditioning and one flight of steps – it's no wonder that critics oftentimes complain about today's 'lazy Americans' because if this is what real life is like, then we don't do the half of it! Case in point: the minute my Tanzanian floormates heard there was no water, they grabbed their buckets, walked the distance to another dorm to fill them with water, then carried them all the way back upstairs without thinking twice about it. Contrastingly, I and my fellow LCCT members figured we would just wait...and wait...and wait until the water finally came back on rather than exert ourselves in such a manner because 1) last time the water ran out and we went to fill our buckets, the water came back on an hour later, and 2) do you know how heavy that bucket full of water gets after 8 flights of stairs? (Pathetic, I know.)
I have never dreamed that at college, I would have to boil my own drinking water, wash all my clothes by hand, sleep with a mosquito net each night or worry about cockroaches in my bed. As a child of an era of technology, I will be the first to admit that conveniences and machines that do the work for us have been largely an expected part of life. So in contrast with the reality of so many Tanzanians, my trip home in December seems like a luxury vacation rather than returning to the only existence I had ever known before coming here, home with all of the delicacies I will return to, ever so more aware of the workload I avoid in having them.
*Picture was taken in Bagamoyo, a nearby historic city known for being a central hub during the ivory and slave trade, at one of the outdoor fish markets there. No portable stoves or built-in ovens for cooking the fish, only open fires in the ground - gives it that hot-off-the-grill flavor. :)
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