3 months in Africa is coming to a close. That is a very strange thing to think about.
For your edification and entertainment, here is a list of things that happened to my stuff while I was here. Enjoy.
1. It gets dirty. (Betcha didn’t expect that one!) The only reason I bought a backpack that was a pale color is because it was on sale. It is definitely not the color it was when I started.
2. It wears out faster. In Africa my wardrobe is even more limited than to the two packing cubes worth of clothes I brought. (It’s culturally inappropriate for a woman to show her knees here). When you only have 5 shirts, 2 skirts and 2 pairs of pants you have to wear the same clothes pretty often. Especially when you get some of your clothes professionally washed and then don’t want to wear them because they are actually clean.
Anyways having to wear the same things every day and put them through the literal wringer of hand-washing in a bucket certainly accelerates the wear and tear.
One of the best things I think I brought is the 8 sewing needles tucked into the liner of my pencil case.
3. It gets moldy. So far we have been mostly on the coast (this is actually one of the reasons I picked my route. I love the ocean/ the water). This means it has been incredibly humid.
Last month I discovered that some of the clothes I hadn’t been wearing regularly that were tucked into the bottom of my bag had mold growing all over them. (Hence the professional laundry service as mentioned above). Also side note, I am thankful there even was a professional laundry service in Lomé. In both the village and town we were in month 1 and month two, this was not a thing.
4. Beat up books. This probably has less to do with Africa and more to do with travel days, but things like my kindle cover, my Bible, and my notebook are looking pretty rough. We can use the term “well-loved.”
5. Sticky melted rubber bands. I don’t feel the need to expound.
6. All my silver oxidized. Why? I’m not sure. It doesn’t do that when I’m in America. Also VA is pretty humid so I don’t think it has anything to do with that. I’ll have to do some research on that one.
7. Rust. Everything metal that’s not silver is now rusty. Including but (probably) not limited to: The tin I keep my shampoo bar in, the tin I keep my jewelry in, my nail clippers, a few bobby pins, some of my safety pins, the zippers on my backpack, even my glasses have a little rust on them. (This last one is quite unfortunate. If anyone knows what to do about rusty glasses, please let me know in the comments below. I haven’t had enough access to WiFi to google it/ when I do have WiFi I forget to)
In a few days we are off to Thailand where I may or may not replace half of what I own.
Cheers,
-Hattie
