when fetching water can be dangerous...

lets just say when it rains in rookdale (my village), it pours.

yesterday afternoon, on my way home from work, it started to rain. luckily, the taxi drops me off at my gate, so i don't have such a long distance to travel to get safely inside my hut. i hopped off the taxi, popped open my umbrella (which broke into two pieces in my hands) then quickly scurried through the gate. i had my bag around my shoulder and my clean, ironed clothes that i had just picked up from the cleaner in a plastic bag in my hand. the first bit of my yard is dirt, so when it rains it turns into a mudslide. this makes maneuvering it quite difficult, but i was managing just fine, that is until the bottom of the plastic bag with the clean clothes ripped open and all of my clothes fell into the mud. now of course they couldn't fall in clump, sparing some from disaster but instead had to fall out evenly distributing themselves into the mud. AWESOME! i screamed out and hurried to get them off the ground, all while my younger host brother and 3 of his friends watched me from the safety of the house. i am annoyed, but i carry on across the yard, as the rain is still pounding down on my head.

once inside my hut, i quickly began trying to get the mud out of the clothes with the smallest amounts on them. i took a cloth and a container of water and began scrubbing. i managed to get about 5 items clean-ish and hung them up on the clothes line in my room. a few other articles of the whiter variety were too dirty to be saved with a mere cloth, so i through them into my big bucket and dumped the rest of my water bucket on top. sadly, it wasn't enough water, so i braved the rain and went to my tap to fill my bucket up again. i made it all the way back across the yard, right to my front door step when i biffed. i mean i really biffed- mother of all biffs biffed, and my body slammed down onto the tiny cement step, scraping up my arm and leg and covering my body in mud. now lets think about what happens when a person biffs with a 5L bucket of water in their hands...

i picked myself up, swearing and tearing up from the pain, and began the process of cleaning up 5L of water from my hut floor. that's right folks, the water bucket emptied onto the floor of my tiny room. luckily, my floor is dodgy and slanted and all the water rushed to one corner- the no mans land corner. this is the corner where i keep my cleaning supplies and such, where there is an ant hill and lots of bugs. i don't mess around back there, so over the months, it has accumulated a lot of dirt and dead bug bodies. i started mopping up the water, but i seemed to be getting nowhere, so i took the only two big momma shower towels i have and used them to soak up a tiny bit of water. then i moved all the shelves and buckets and started mopping up the rest. when i finally finished 30 mins later, my mop was dirty and covered with dead bug bodies that wouldn't come out. it took me another ten mins to clean the mop. then i headed back again to mop up the rest of the dirt and grime that had worked its way all over my floor.

with the floor finished, i went back outside to get my water bucket and realized that in the fall, the bucket received a fatal injury in the form of a giant hole in the bottom. angry, i dug out the one bucket i had left, which was also filled with dirt and bugs, and started cleaning that out, along with my mop and mopping bucket. the whole time it was still raining outside and i was still covered in mud, head to toe. once the cleaning of buckets was complete, i started the process of cleaning my door mat and gogo rug that i had on the floor when the water attacked. i had to hang them on the clothes line and dump buckets of water over them to clean the dirt off. then i started the process of cleaning the clothes that were covered in mud. now the things i take to the cleaner are the things that i find hard to wash by hand: big towels, jeans, sweatshirts, etc. lets just say i wasn't very happy trying to get the grim out of my bulky items.

when everything was said and done, i was soaking wet, the sort of clean clothes were on the clothes line (in the rain) and my floor was slowly drying. it was about 7:30pm and dark. Only 2+ hours of good cleaning to end a day! i sat down on my bed to watch an episode of scrubs on my computer when all of a sudden the screen went black. man, i have all the luck...

how congolese get the 'sicky sicky': a story of sex with animals

this may be the most bizarre blog post to date. last week i decided to accompany two of my coworkers to the local hair salon. i wanted to see exactly what they had done to their hair. i must admit, the salon was quite sad- a couple random chairs, a bucket in the sink they filled to wash your hair, some old nasty towels. the experience was interesting as i watched how my coworkers had their hair washed with a couple different products then had their hair covered in yellow gunk and placed under the dryers for 30 mins. now the staff of this salon consisted of two zulu women and one women from the congo (who spoke very little english and zulu). with 30 mins to kill, the congolese woman decided to chat in the best way she knew how, and tell us stories of her homeland.

she first started by admiring my piercings and visible tattoos with a look of horror. she kept asking me "nice? nice?" which i think was her way of wondering if they hurt. she then told me "jesus no like you. no like tattoos" to which i responded that it was fine, jesus and i didn't have a relationship anyways. from there, clearly not off of her tattoo rant yet, she told us all how women in the congo get their boyfriends name tattooed across their breast and then they break up with said boyfriend, meet a new man, marry him without telling him of the tattoo and then on the honeymoon, when the new man finally sees the tattoo, he gets upset, goes to priest and then they get divorced. i think this happened to her sister, but it could have just been her way of saying woman... i am not quite sure.

now all of this was done in very broken english with random french words thrown in. it was entertaining and it killed the time while we all sat there (this was during work by the way). but then suddenly, our friendly congolese friend started talking about horses (she used the french word until we figured out what it meant) and doing absurd hand and hip gestures. it took me a while to catch on but finally i realized that she was talking about having sex with a horse. from there, the story went something like this:

woman: people *hip thrust* inyama but inyama sicky sicky then people get sicky sicky
me: so they get the sicky sicky from the animals, the horses?
woman: yes, animal sicky sicky, man sicky sicky then *hip thrust* woman. woman get sicky sicky (all of this was hand signaled with her grabbing her crotch and saying sicky sicky and then grabbing the imaginary crotch of someone else and saying sicky sicky-thus the transfer)
woman: get sicky sicky congo, no medicine, just kufa, kufa (followed by her acting dead)
woman: horse big for human
me: oh i didn't need to know that. where does this happen?
woman: congo and here. everywhere.
me: i see

by this point i was laughing in a stunned sort of way. she was so serious and she just kept repeating herself and her hip thrusts over and over to get her point across. then she continued:

woman: mulungu get fat woman, give money, money
me: wait, white people? me?
woman: yes, no you, mulungu in congo
me: ok good
woman: mulungu get fat woman, give money, give ruff ruff
all of us: dog?
woman: yes give dog, woman *hip thurst* dog. dog sicky sicky, woman sicky sicky. no medicine. woman kufa.

at this point i am wondering if she is saying she blames white people for the sicky sicky, which i take to mean HIV & AIDS. i don't ask her this question or any others for that matter.

after 2o mins of the animal sex conversation, my coworker had had enough and kindly demanded that she wash the crap out of her hair and finish the process. my other coworker said this woman hardly ever spoke when they were normally in there, and blamed me for her random (and disturbing) outbursts.

their hair was washed again, dried and then carefully combed into the style in which it will remain for weeks to come. then the three of us got up and left, laughing as soon as we exited.

lets just say that sicky sicky has become a part of our vocabulary now...