Outdoor washing

The offending washing line

Washing dishes

This is the floor AFTER I have cleaned it!!

This is Vicky and Marcus at our local bar

“You have got to have systems!”

Before Marcus left to go back to the UK Vicky came to visit and was the second person after Ashley to experience the luxury sleeping quarters, the bamboo bed with deluxe (pop up) mosquito net. Vicky enjoyed this experience, she claimed, but I got the distinct feeling that she was somewhat disturbed by my house! I don’t know what it is but a lot of my good friends seem to be somewhere on the OCD spectrum and Vicky is I would say towards the high end of the scale. Maybe I am drawn to people who seek order in their lives. Who knows, but Vicky did take me aside and give me a bit of a pep talk. “You know Luc, you don’t have any systems. You need systems”

The washing up system (or lack of it I suppose) was the first thing that disturbed her, the outdoor washing up system was the second thing and she was ultra disturbed by the fact that my jerry cans had no lids and by the sagging washing line just by my bed that threatened to garrot me every time I got out of bed. This she fixed in an instant just by hoiking it up high so it was above my head. Amazing the most common sense things that never occur to me! She suggested that some time during the summer she come and help me sort my systems out.

So that was that, when I returned from the UK at the end of the summer I was able to go and visit Vicky in Kerewan for a few days to get a look at her systems first hand. There were buckets and kettles galore. Bucket with a lid to keep dirty dishes in away from insects, a bucket for waste water so that one can rinse and drain things into it. Two buckets for bathing water and a very nifty toilet roll holder made out of rope and a plastic zip lock bag, perfect for the rainy season. (Simple yet ingenious) Wish I had a photograph! She had to laugh when I got out of her bed and ducked to avoid the invisible washing line!

I wished I had taken my camera so that I could have taken a photograph of the systems in order to replicate them exactly. But I had to be content with a mental picture. As soon as I got back I went bucket and plastic kettle shopping at the market. So now I have at least rudimentary systems in place which no doubt need some fine tuning. But I am sure Vicky will help me with that on her next visit!

At The Compound

Unwelcome Visitors.

I was bracing myself for re entering my house after a long absence and having left in somewhat of a rush. But it was even worse than I imagined. There was a layer of mould growing on all the furniture and a jungle had taken over my pit latrine . If these things weren’t bad enough, later I made an even more gruesome discovery. A pile of cockroach infested dirty clothes! There began the performance of extricating the little critters But by the fiftieth critter Ellie and I had it down to a fine art. I picked up the item of clothing shook it, then Ellie armed with Bop sprayed the thing until it was dazed and confused then whoever was nearest violently stamped on it or frantically chased it around until it ran up a wall and then flattened it with a flip flop. It has to be violent because these things don’t die easily.

After about two hours in the 40 degree heat the cockroach massacre had ended and the back yard was littered with cockroach corpses with a fair amount of blood and guts.

Now I had a cockroach free house or so I thought! Two nights later I was woken up at 3.30 in the morning by a rustling sound coming from somewhere in my bedroom. It was so noisy I thought it must be a mouse so I tentatively got out from underneath my mosquito net to investigate. I shone my torch around the room to try and work out where the noise was coming from but couldn’t see anything. So I sat down on a jerry can defeated, thinking I wasn’t going to get any more sleep that night when a giant cockroach emerged from under the bed. I quickly put an end to him but kept listening because I couldn’t believe that a cockroach could make that much noise!

Thankfully the noise stopped so feeling happy that it wasn’t a mouse I crawled back under the mosquito net. Only to wake with a start an hour later. A siren was going off outside and I had incorporated this into my dream and woke up thinking I had to evacuate the house! The final straw was the call to prayer over loudspeaker an hour later. After that I gave up on the idea of sleep and watched another episode of the wire!

The joys of living in The Gambia!