Milk Products and Hot Showers

One month into this experience, I think I’ve earned the right to list the things I am missing about home.

Things I Miss:

- Fresh dairy products. Here it’s powdered milk and that’s it.
- Hot showers. I have running water but it’s cold. Sometimes the sun warms the water in the tank, which is on the roof, and I’ll get about a minute of warm water. It’s actually too hot out to have a hot shower, but I do miss the feeling of being really, really clean.
- Being anonymous. Everyone in town knows who we are. About 20 kids on the street scream “Alice!” when they see me. I don’t have the heart to tell them that’s only two-thirds of my name.
- Listening to music on my iPod as I walk. Doing that here is just asking to be robbed.
- Feeling cozy. Here I mostly feel sweaty.
- Identifiable green leafy vegetables. I’ve had the occasional lettuce leaf and cucumber here but the staple is the cassava leaf. There was also an experience with a cucumber and some maggots, but that’s a story for another day.
- Sleeping with covers. It’s too hot to do that here.
- Efficiency. It took me two hours to get 20 photocopies made yesterday.
- Fast broadband Internet. Mine is too slow to watch anything on YouTube.
- Set prices. Everything you buy here requires some bargaining.
- Familiar faces. Family, friends.
- Being (for the most part) invisible to the opposite sex. The guy selling meat on the street asked for my phone number today, which has never happened to me in Canada. Not that I don’t love a good flirting session alongside my street meat.

Things I Don’t Miss:

- Having to look fashionable. I could wear the exact same thing every day and nobody would care, which of course means I packed too much.
- Having to wear makeup. Here it just melts off your face so there really is no point.
- Blow drying my hair. It gets sweaty and goes straight into a ponytail, every day.
- Paying more than 30 cents for public transportation (a motorcycle taxi costs about 25 cents one-way)
- Being reminded that the economy is in ruins and that jobs are scarce

Apparently one list is longer than the other. I’m sure that will change as the months go by.