Reasoning with ants

Cooped up: view from my back terrace
shortly after moving in.  Still, beautiful sky!

My good friend Christina asked recently about my feelings in this new world.  When I read her comment my reflex was instant and absolute:

Feelings?  I don't have feelings.  

Call me Cleopatra, my standard reaction when my feelings aren't Happy is denial.  It isn't very mature, but I've come to recognize it, and my reaction is now a reminder that the feelings are still there - as everyone around me is usually very aware - even though I hoped they would go away.

It's not that I think my other feelings are bad, but they're usually transient, and sometimes they feel counterproductive, and certainly disproportionate.  I mean, my vital signs are all normal: clearly I'm fine.  I want to accentuate the positive, as the old song goes (here sung by the great Ella Fitz).  I really don't want to be one of those people who complains all the time, and I know how easy it can be to slip into that.  So how do I put my feelings into perspective, acknowledging them without exaggerating them?  My current ant problem might be a good example.

It don't mind ants.  In fact I don't mind most bugs, and the only ones I will kill on purpose (if I can) are mosquitoes and flies.  I call that self-defense.  Ants, I believe, are clever and hard-working and relatively egalitarian (the queen just reproduces, she doesn't tell the workers what to do).  I know they have some gender issues - it isn't the perfect society - but as far as I'm concerned (as long as they're not actually on me, in which case they must die, as I have told them repeatedly) ants are cool.  So I am flummoxed by their fascination with my electric kettle.

The kettle was the first appliance I bought after my fridge.  Here the electric generation is 50% hydropower so I felt all sustainable, compared to the charcoal that most people use to cook.  It opened up new food options: couscous and hot drinks and powdered soup (I have since added a gas burner, imagine the possibilities!).  I was doing good and taking a new step toward food autonomy.  I was in control of my destiny.

Achievement unlocked: first real cooked meal in my house,
about a month ago.  That's the kettle on the left.

The tiny little ants who live here like the kettle too.  I have no idea why.  Even though it's not much fun to come in and find them in my cocoa powder (Ivoirian cacao, of course) or in my dirty dishes in the sink, it makes sense.  I can work with that.  They managed to break into some sealed cup-a-soup packets I had on a shelf, which is annoying but impressive.  However, if I keep the dishes clean and seal my food properly or put it in the fridge, no problem.

So what's the deal with the kettle?  There's no food in it, and so no conceivable attraction.  I thought it was random at first, and that after they saw it boil they would stop coming.  But no, they keep coming, not tons of them like to the cocoa and the soup, but often at least half a dozen, scurrying in and out of the electrical element (they're really very small) or sometimes clumped together floating on the surface of any water I might have left, clinging to one another like so many tiny shipwreck survivors.  When I pour out the water and they hit solid ground they run for their lives.  That is, as long as I notice them and clean them out before I turn the kettle on.  Otherwise I get boiled ants.

Now this isn't a serious problem - it poses no significant threat to the ant population and it's actually pretty easy to manage.  What's more, I know if I told any of my three security guards or maid (yes, I'm a volunteer and yet have 4 dedicated household staff), or if I talked to the plumbers in my team or the guys in the facilities management unit at work, any of them could hook me up with someone to pump my little house full of enough toxic chemicals to give the ants pause.  But I don't particularly want pesticide in my electric kettle either.  I just want to understand why.  Not understanding, I feel isolated.

Camp hospitality: the Moroccan contingent
served us tea and breakfast on a silver tray

I feel this kind of isolation at work too, with the crushing bureaucracy that eventually I'm sure I'll get used to but so far still makes me crazy.  Yesterday my colleague in the Water and Sanitation unit was at the office (many of us go in for an hour or two on the weekend, and I will probably go again later today).  He is a lovely Sudanese man named Ali who has been here for five years and held the WatSan fort on his own for over a year before I arrived.  He asked me what I thought of the mission so far.  I found it hard to be positive, and I wouldn't want him to think that it's the people.  Everyone has been very nice to me, and particularly in our unit I have really enjoyed working with the team, learning about the country and the history of the mission and their experiences here when things were really bad during la crise.  They're the ones who are teaching me to eat with my fingers, too.  But the military/UN system is byzantine and really impersonal, and from where I stand these days, the most obvious effect of that is to undermine trust and teamwork within the mission.  Trying to get anything done often seems about as effective as reasoning with the suicidal ants.

My feelings of isolation also seem to flag injustice up in high relief.  It's the fundamental unfairness of life, and I am simultaneously a privileged international staff member, with pay and benefits far better than that of the local staff (who don't get security guards, by the way, not to mention R&R, first choice of the PPE, or evacuation if things get really bad) not to mention all locals not working for the UN, and at the same time a woman in a professional world designed and almost exclusively occupied by men (the admin assistant, Carole, and I are the two women in the sector's 40 engineering staff), who doubtless had the best intentions but clearly have no idea how non-men experience the world (I'm still working on the feminist toilet rant - that's for another time).  The result is that I often seem to alternate between feelings of guilt and indignation/self-pity.

Happy: pretty flowers and butterflies all over
(but the butterflies rarely sit still for the camera)

In all honesty, my annoyances and frustrations are mostly not about Great Injustice.  They are mostly about things as insignificant (to non-ants) as boiled ants.  In fact their one redeeming feature is that they do sometimes make me think about more profound problems, so I really shouldn't ignore them or edit them out of my story here.  Then when I'm feeling a bit more mellow and in control maybe I can learn how to improve them.  It's a lot easier to see things like that in a new place.  Even though I have felt crabby a lot of the time recently, I'm genuinely grateful to be here.

I know with time I won't be as annoyed by the little things, and I won't notice the big things as much either.  Either fishing the boiled carcasses of ants out of my tea will have become habit (maybe, like in the old joke about Peace Corps volunteers, I will even reach the point where I eat them for the extra protein) or I will have caved to the pressure to nuke my house.  I will eventually know who to ask for the key to the ladies room at every camp where we work, and to ask for it before everyone leaves if we're working late on sewage treatment plant maintenance (foreshadowing: the source of the feminist toilet rant material).  Right now I'm in classic culture shock, with the accompanying annoyance, isolation, and judgmental nit-pickiness (there's a good description of it on Sheffield University's study abroad webpage, if you're interested).  It's very common, and almost all of you have probably felt it too, even if only when changing jobs or something like that.  Eventually, the culture shock will pass, and I'll feel less isolated, and less annoyed.  It's typical.

Nothing annoys me more than being typical.  I guess I'll just have to learn to live with that.

Quiet weekend

Nicely painted workshop at the corner of my road

It's a rainy weekend in Daloa, and there's not a lot to do besides surf the net in my little house behind the Total station on the road to Abidjan.  That's my actual address - as far as I can tell, here the streets have no name.  I guess now I know what U2 was singing about.

It doesn't feel like a post from me without some mention of Ebola, so here's a link to an educational (?) music video by DJ Lewis, an Ivoirian dj.  The music is "coupé-décalé", a dance genre started by Ivoirian émigrés in Paris and then brought back to become popular here (and not all as weird as this one).  DJ Lewis was on the charts a few years back with a similar hit about bird flu - seems to be a bit of a theme...

Finger food

Papaya season is just starting - they're not hard
to eat with your fingers, but can be messy!

Here, eating "à l'Africaine" means eating with your fingers.  It's not just for chicken wings - under the guidance of my Ivoirian plumbing crew I have really expanded my finger food horizons.  It's a whole new world of etiquette but they're coaching me and progressively more food ends up in my mouth and less on my clothes.

It takes a bit of practice, and maybe some spare napkins, but this is definitely something everyone can try at home.  I bet your kids will enjoy it, and you'll have fewer dishes to wash, so it's ecological too!

First things first, wash your hands because you'll all be eating from the same dish.  At the restaurants they bring two little buckets of water to the table with a hand towel and either a saucer of laundry detergent or a bottle of liquid soap.  One bucket is to lather and the other to rinse.  You can just go to the sink though, a lot of restaurants have one or two at the back just for that.  In fact at a place we went to on Wednesday they said they weren't using buckets any more because of Ebola.

A fairly typical "maquis" or streetside restaurant/bar.
The sinks are along the back wall.

Use only your right hand, because the left has other, toilet-related responsibilities and nobody wants that in their communal plate.  Then just tuck in.  Take a handful of rice, squish it together in your fist or against the side of the dish with your fingers and then use your thumb to flick it into your mouth.  When you get comfortable with that you can try dipping it in sauce or pinching it against some cooked onions or chopped tomatoes.

Uncle Sam rice, imported from Thailand

The trick is not to take too much at a time.  I made that mistake at first, I thought I could eat rice like a fist-full of popcorn.  It wasn't pretty.  The main starches here are attiéké (a couscous-like dish made from manioc/yuca), and rice, although they gave us spaghetti at the Niger battalion camp where we were working this week.  The spaghetti was actually the easiest.  It was cut up and stuck together pretty well on its own.

For protein it's mostly chicken, which is easy, and fish, which is not.  The fish is generally served whole, possibly in a sauce, and you just reach in and tear off chunks of the flesh.  Be careful because it can be surprisingly hot, though for once it's your fingertips not your tongue getting burned.  Then you're supposed to work out the bones with your tongue and spit them discretely into a neat pile on the table beside your plate or, if outdoors, onto the floor.  They do the same thing in China, which was where a few years ago I learned that my spitting skills are nowhere near refined enough.  Here I play it safe at the restaurant by just taking the bones out with my fingers.  All my dinner table companions kindly ignore the faux-pas.

Bon apétit!

I haven't tried eating goat with my fingers yet,
but it can't be as hard as fish!

Electrical woes

Inside of a newly cleaned 2 m3 water storage tank
(on it's side)

My weekend has been hijacked somewhat by electrical problems at my little house in Daloa.  It seems that when the developer built the group of houses in 2011, in the middle of "la crise", they didn't have access to (or didn't budget for) good quality electrical cables, so now mine have taken industrial action.  Since Thursday they are working at severely reduced capacity, overheating and tripping the breaker if I use more than one appliance at a time, including the fridge.  It will all be fixed on Tuesday, they tell me, when they will rewire the house.

So now the fridge is on and I'm at the office using the internet.  I didn't bring my laptop so I only have access to work photos, which explains today's picture.  Still, it's a nice color, isn't it?

Weekend at work

A weaver bird poses by its nest near the camp

Sorry I didn't get a blog post out this weekend, we had a bit of a crisis at work.

Here it's rainy season and last week on Tuesday we had a terrific storm that brought down a major electricity transmission line feeding the southwest of the country.  All of our camps have backup generators, so that was no problem, but the local water company, SODECI, apparently does not and one of our camps in that area was hit particularly hard.  They have a borehole to supplement what they get from SODECI, but that hasn't been working very well for a few weeks now.

Pulling the pump pipework out of the well
(it is not supposed to be muddy)

The camp in question is pretty isolated, in a town right on the border with Liberia, and with the whole Ebola situation the soldiers from Niger stationed there are understandably a bit on edge.  When the water was still out after 4 days, tempers were running high.  So I went down with two of our plumbers for the weekend and replaced the borehole pump, which had been overwhelmed by mud.  It didn't fix the problem, and we'll have to go back to clean out the well completely and maybe even put in a new one, but at least the troops there don't feel like they've been abandoned.  SODECI got the water running again by Friday night, which really helped!

I didn't do much of the actual pump removal, I stuck to the (less dirty and maybe not quite equally important) job of taking pictures.  I made it up to the guys by doing most of the driving, and by doing all the paperwork for our trip - and in the UN, there's a lot!

Will try to get a blog out this weekend though, as usual - maybe about the joys and pains of driving here...