White Man’s Soap

Have you ever been in a room filled with really old books covered in dust & cobwebs, mice, lizards, earwicks (or earwigs? not sure on the spelling), & excretions from all of the above? I have. Remember I mentioned in my last post that I took up the Sisaali book inventory project for SILDEP? Well I thought that the boxes & piles of books in the office & watchman’s room were bad, but that was only the start of it…the worst was yet to come. When Margrit, Jonas (the Swiss carpenter), & I went to SILDEP’s supervisor’s mother-in-law’s house, there was an entire room off of her semi-compound that held all that I mentioned above…including chewed up boxes & books, a bunch of items that the supervisor’s mother-in-law owns that look like they haven’t been touched in years, & the largest sack of shea nuts that I’ve ever seen. So, over the past few days, Jonas & I have become master book counters, cleaners & exterminators. I don’t know how many cans of Raid we went through, but it wasn’t & will still never be enough to kill all of the earwicks that were & still are crawling around in the books & boxes. And throughout the cleaning & exterminating, we’ve been wearing gloves because these earwicks have a pretty nasty pinch. To make matters worse, in the cleaning process Jonas & I had realized that the shea nut bag had a hole at the bottom of it…that would explain why the nuts were hidden in all nooks & crannies of the room – those darn mice. So we brought another bag to pour the shea nuts into but it wasn’t big enough so as of right now, we put half of the shea nuts in the new bag & kept the other half in the big bag with a hole in it - & we were still barely able to drag both of the bags outside.

The poor old supervisor’s mother-in-law just returned home from being in the hospital for some sort of a toothache, so she’s been watching us work all afternoon under the heat of the sun day in & day out, & I think she gets tired by just watching us work. On the first day that Jonas & I began working at her place, a little boy related to her kept trying to steal my pen that I was using to write down how many books there were, so the next day Jonas gave him one of his pens…which might or might not have been a bad idea because the first thing the little boy went to write on were the books that we were counting. Anyway, Jonas & I haven’t seen the boy in a few days, but the supervisor’s mother-in-law just told us (she’s pretty fluent in English) that the little boy had asked her what type of soap we (Jonas & I) use. She thought this was a strange question to ask, so she asked the boy why he was asking such a silly question. So apparently the boy excitingly replied to her in Sisaali, “I want to use the same soap that the white people use so I can be white like them!” As the woman told this story to Jonas & I, the three of us began laughing hysterically. Oh children really say the funniest things, but it’s an interesting idea though. Imagine if soap could magically change your skin color…I wonder if there would be more or less racism in the world if changing your skin color were that easy.

As for other news, SILDEP is busy preparing for the Peace Corps Dry Season Farming IST (In-Service Training) this weekend. My job? Making more berry & papaya jam by picking the fruits from the garden & mashing them together, & baking brownies & a mock apple pie (using green papaya instead). Living at SILDEP with a full kitchen is awesome. I’ve also been helping the day watchman to water the garden once in a while so I’m getting a few pointers on gardening from him. And of course there’s always helping Lydia with her moringa. This time she was crushing the outside shell from the moringa seeds so that the seeds could be weighed & packaged to sell at the guesthouse, so I was showing her how to use the scale to weigh them. It doesn’t help that she forgets what numbers are greater or lesser than other numbers, but she gets to the correct number on the scale eventually…so in the end, she’s teaching herself, which is exactly what I had planned. Moreover, I have been working on updating SILDEP guesthouse’s brochure because the Burkina Faso border patrol passes it out to people driving into Ghana & since they ran out of brochures to hand out, they need more - & preferably updated ones. And this morning I just went to a Naming Ceremony, which is a ceremony in Ghana that happens 1 week after a baby is born & it is the only time that the baby’s name is announced to everyone. A traditional Naming Ceremony would have had a lot of dancing & drops of water (& alcohol apparently) put on the baby’s tongue, but this was a Christian Naming Ceremony so we just did a lot of singing & praying before the name, Jane, was announced for the adorable baby girl wrapped in a blanket in her mother’s arms. What can I say? I keep busy.

Love, as always, Rachel

PS- Thanks to my family back home for keeping me updated with sports as the days to the Super Bowl draw nearer…GO GIANTS!