Sim(ulated)-City
If you’re someone who plans on visiting a PCV anytime soon, let me just suggest that you have a daily schedule prepared before arriving. I’ve been here going on seven weeks now and things are beginning to get a little monotonous. It’s my own fault actually. It’s not like I don’t have anything to do. I brought my laptop with me for these specific moments.
Why am I not doing work? Well one, it’s a vacation (like that matters, right?). Two, there’s just too much stimuli outside for me to even concentrate on doing something from home. So what did I do instead? Washed. Washed clothes and any dishes that might have been lurking about the apartment.
By now I’m sure my fingertips are about as clean as they’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know what the ingredients of this brown soap are, but it sure does the job on cleaning clothes. Does it so well, that if you’ve got colored clothes, regardless of how long you’ve had them, the dye will begin to run.
This is some strong soap! And we use it to wash clothes, dishes, the floor and so on. Anything that powerful should definitely have a sticker on it. Oh, but wait, that’s in the west, we’re in Cameroon.
At one point, I believe Akilah was using it to wash herself. That was even before I knew of how powerful this soap was. So being the kind person I am, I sent a generous supply of black soap and liquid soaps from Yves Rocher. Good thing I did, now there’s a nice supply of soap here for me to use (I’ve got particularly sensitive skin).
Before I wondered how folks could keep these white outfits so spotless. Not only are they able wear them for a day and barely get a speck of dirt on it, but when you see the outfit again, it’s as if they’d just taken it out of the dry cleaners.
Normally, something like that would not even cross my mind, but considering I have problems keeping anything I wear free of dirt, I have to marvel at this. Moreover, there are women who are able to wear full-length pagne outfits, which come about an inch from the ground, and there’s not a bit of dirt along the bottom. Now why can’t I do the same thing with a regular pair of pants? Someone needs to share the secret with me.
Today was also the first time I witnessed two Cameroonians in a brawl. Well, I actually heard a ruckus first, and then Akilah and I looked out over the balcony, of her apartment, after hearing a woman scream a few times. There was a nice sized crowd that had gathered, and from what I could tell, there were at least four or five people scuffling.
Otherwise the day for me was pretty simple, I assisted Akilah with preparing our dinner of curried lentils and rice. Good thing we found the Indian curry package in Bafoussam this weekend, I don’t think we could’ve eaten another plate of plantain and omelets!