Another Saturday at “the Chicken”

So I live in a bright yellow, two-bedroom house nicknamed “the Chicken” with my 31 year-old Namibian house-mate/coworker/ invaluable friend, Beata. We named it that because 1) it’s bright yellow 2) we are down the street from a take-away place called “Jenny’s Chicken” and 3) I have been telling Beata since we decided to move in together that I want to raise some chickens. We’ve lived here for less than a month and it shows because we have no table or chairs, countertops, or cabinets for our food or even a coach to sit on. Our sitting room is full of piles of tiles and buckets of paint (the house is still in the process of renovation). However, I really think I have the ideal living situation. I don’t have to live with an entire host family, which can be a little trying for those of us who have been independent for quite some years, but I am also glad I don’t live alone. I still get the cultural experience of living with a Namibian who can show me the ropes, so to speak. Plus, she is someone I admire and get along with very well (which is fortunate since we both live and work together).

I wake up to heat and brightness of the African sunshine on my face despite the fact my curtains are drawn tightly shut. It’s about 6am and regardless of the suns rays, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep because the neighbors are blasting their funky Herero music (I don’t know how to describe it –it’s heavy on the accordion, though). They are up cleaning or who knows what, but they are clearly making a party of it.

I got into the kitchen to boil some water for tea and then I just stare out the kitchen windows to see what my neighbors are up to. I know Beata won’t be up for another 4 or 5 hours so I try to move about the house quietly. Finally at around 8 or 9, I can’t help myself any longer and I pull out my guitar to just pluck some strings ever so quietly so that it might not be heard through the thin wall that separates our bedrooms.

My only real plan for the day is to cook dinner and to hand wash my clothes in time to lay them out on the fence for drying while the sun is overhead. Cooking has become my new hobbie –kind of accidentally. Before we moved in together, Beata mentioned that she liked cleaning and the sentence that followed was, “okay so you cook and I’ll clean.” She made this decision not knowing that I have a history of subsisting merely on microwaved quesadillas that one semester in college I tried to go without a meal plan. She sounded so excited, “I want to eat American food!” Somehow I fooled my Namibian roommate into thinking that eating the can of beans I dumped into a pot of spaghetti is a cultural experience. Don’t get me wrong, occasionally I go out on a limb and make things like calzones from scratch and peanut soup creole –God bless the Peace Corps for issuing us cookbooks!

Last Saturday was my first real hand-washing laundry experience. You may be thinking, how hard can it be? I was thinking the same thing but there is definitely a “right” and “wrong” way to do it. You’ll know you’ve done it right when your inexperienced hands and wrists bleed because they haven’t been toughened by a lifetime without a washing machine. First, we put one article in a soapy bucket at a time and scrub it -every inch of it! There is a certain sound produced when she rubs the clothing together against her hands that I just cannot seem to emulate. It took something like 3 hours (lengthened by the laughing at my attempts) to get through all of our laundry because we rinsed it multiple times, each time scrubbing and wring out each item. As we carried the heavy bucket of wet clothing out to the line to dry, I was so worried that I’d drop it. If it spilled across the Mariental red dust that surrounds our house and we’d have to start it all over again. Go kiss your washers and dryer because it was 6 hours from the time we threw the first jeans in the bucket to the time we pulled our dry clothes off the line.