A day in the life

Sometimes I wish I were Walter Mitty and had alternate lives that I lived in my mind. But I'm generally speaking a pretty down-to-earth person, so yesterday wasn't too exciting. Still, compared to your life, maybe it was different enough to be interesting. I got a cute email from my friend Lisa two nights ago about her typical crazy day and how different her life is from mine. (Lisa, I wish you had time for and an interest in blogging!) So here's a glimpse of Thursday:

I woke up at 06:00 but had trouble falling back to sleep... which was weird because I was up late last night playing Spider Solitaire and hoping beyond all reasonable hope that the Internet would connect from our living room. (I'm in my parents' living room at present.) It was actually a quiet morning, relatively. No crying baby from next-door. No goats bleating mournfully outside the window. I don't even remember hearing a single cock crow.

But I didn't get up until just before 08:00. I fed the cat (a gruel made from beans, maize, guinea corn, crayfish, bouillon cubes, & palm oil), put on a new dress (that I bought yesterday specifically for these next few "maternity" months), and ate a banana muffin. (Bananas are something you can always get here, and they always seem to ripen faster than the two of us can eat them!) Call me gross, but I didn't brush my teeth. I have a hard time not throwing up when I brush my teeth these days, between our toilet's not being flushed regularly due to no water, and just the act of spitting out toothpaste. Ugh. So I chewed a piece of treasured sugar-free gum instead. David had taken the car today, so I made a peanut-butter sandwich while I waited for my ride to come get me for work. He arrived around 08:40, we piled my computer, backpack, and California Raisins lunchbox (from a previous decade) into his car, and we were off in his beat-up old 196? Honda. (I love his car. The knobs have fallen off the window handles, and there's no handle on the inside of the door to open it, so you have to stick your hand out the window and open the door from the outside! Plus the fuel pump klunks up a storm.)

The road to our office is pretty...well...Let's just say when my morning sickness was bad, I could not go over that road without feeling sick. The last mile or so is dirt, rutted and full of pot-holes. It's like a video game trying to steer along the clearest part of road and avoid the deepest holes. I was glad Pastor Ben was driving! Finally, we turned through the steel gate into the compound where our office is situated (the guard had to open the gate for us). The car park is just an area with some loose gravel and fewer weeds.

We went inside, climbed a flight of very steep and uneven stairs (I clinging to the rail), and were greeted by, "Sannu da zuwa," (loosely, greetings and welcome) and "Sorry, you can't use your office this morning." Our 2nd-in-command, Pastor Nore, explained further that our chief boss, Jonathan, had scheduled a meeting in the conference room in which Pastor Ben and I usually work. Well, I'm not really picky. I just needed a chair and an outlet for my computer (David's computer, actually). So I moved in with my supervisor, Adena, who even has a standing fan in her office. (YAY!) I spent the next six hours entering changes onto WordPerfect documents, a separate document for each of 52 Sunday school lessons in the Young Children (pre-school) book. The power was on the whole time, which is always a pleasant surprise, and there was even water coming out of the tap when I went to wash my hands before lunch!


I finished my work around 14:20 and told Pastor Ben (who was working in a different room without a fan) I was ready to leave when he was done. Adena had just left, so I turned on my Phantom of the Opera CD in my computer and flipped through an outline I'd made of the 4-year teen curriculum we're developing. We have to come up with snazzy titles for each lesson, but that's hard. Titles have never been my forte; I usually have to create a title after I've already written the piece. Oh well. Maybe Adena can help me.


It was just after 15:00 when we left the office. I was parched, not having drunk anything all day. (I'd left a bottle of boiled water in the fridge the week before, but someone had taken it, and I can only drink boiled water.) About a half-mile along the dirt road back to the asphalt, we were stopped by a huge truck broken down across the middle of the road. It was impossible to go around it. So we turned around and found another way to the main road, also along rutted dirt paths that took us past a natural gas bottling company, a pharmaceutical factory, and a beer-bottling plant. (Those Guinness trucks are huge!) Finally we passed the biscuit (cookie) factory and were back on the main road. That road isn't too bad... except at the train tracks, where the asphalt has worn away from the steel rails... and a pothole a few feet from the tracks, that's at least 4" deep and 2' wide.


I finally got home around 15:40, fed the cat, and brought the computer over here to my parents' to read email. The path between our houses, which winds around a duplex, is treacherous these days, strewn with rotting mangoes that have dropped from the overhanging trees. One of these days I'm going to fall and break my tailbone!


Mom put a casserole in the oven, said she'd be back in an hour (and to take it out then if she wasn't), and left for a wedding shower. At 18:00, I braved the oven. Mom's oven door has fallen off its hinges and lost a lot of its insulation, so it's perilous to open the oven. The door doesn't shut all the way either unless you brace it with something. So Mom had it shut with a broken towel rod braced against a crate of glass Coke bottles. I figured out how to get it open and shut again, and we ate dinner as soon as Mom was home. (Luke helped me set the table.) The casserole was a real treat: rice, chicken soup, shredded chicken, and--the two special ingredients--broccoli and shredded cheese. Mmm!


After supper, David and I came home, watched the second half of No Deposit, No Return on our 10" TV, briefly entertained a visiting classmate of David's from med school, fed the cat, and went to bed on our mattress on the floor, turning on the floor fan.