The House

 Here’s part two of the story: Arrival home.

 

We roll up to the gate at 1AM as the headlights glare off of the years of dust, rust, and brown paint. Fobbie honks the horn. No response. He honks again, nothing. 3, 4, 5 times before the gate opens to a bleary eyed Pa Brima. Fobbie jokes, “You sleeping Brima?” ‘No, no, no. I just had the radio on.’

 

We had heard that the lock was stiff and the rumors were true. It took 3 different people to get the door open. The house was immaculate. Our housekeeper, Abdul Jalloh, works so hard! His skill is obvious but boy does he work slow. I would imagine he spent at least 8 hours cleaning our house. Our first surprise came on changing the pillow cases. The pillows were covered in mold! They felt cool but not wet. Then the mattress cover had mold too! The book on the bed’s shelf didn’t show any water damage, the ceiling didn’t look like water damage. Weird. We put on clean sheets and collapse until noon the next day.

 

Inside the closet there were more surprises. My shirts were left hanging with the closet doors closed. The ones hanging with some space between them were fine. But where things became bunched there was mold between the shirts. Even inside our filing cabinet (our dresser) the folded clothes had some mildew looking stuff on them. The only thing we can figure is that we were absent during the rainy season. The humidity must be high for so long that even the air can cause things to mold. I haven’t been brave enough to try to use the laptop we left behind.

 

The most unfortunate thing to happen was the death of our backup fan. We have a battery that runs appliances on 110V so it will easily run the one 110V fan we brought. In our absence, somebody plugged the 110 fan into the 220V wall outlet. Dead. So for now, we don’t have a fan at night if the electricity goes out. Happily it’s super nice weather right now. There hasn’t been electricity for about 36 hours now and we aren’t missing the fans. Also, we haven’t bought any food that needs to be refrigerated yet. So that’s a blessing.

 

On the topic of food, Rachel has found some really exciting things in her pantry. We moved the majority of our food into totes for safekeeping in our absence. Inside the tote was a gallon ziplock bag, inside the gallon ziplock bag was an unopened brownie mix, inside the brownie mix was moving, living bugs! How do bugs find a tote, get inside the tote, then chew through two layers of sealed plastic to get our brownies‽ She had a mason jar with a screw lid and a few cashews in the bottom: mold city. A spaghetti dispensing tupperware with some dry spaghetti had a whole nest of bugs living inside. There was a tupperware with one of those buttons you push on the top that expands a rubber seal to secure the lid that was filled with nutritional yeast flakes: even a few bugs in there! Luckily they hadn’t set up a home yet, but this still seems crazy! Nature really is less tamed in Africa.

 

I know that all of this sounds miserable but we are truly happy to be back. We feel like we’ve returned home to our own space, something we (mostly) understand and feel comfortable with. We haven’t seen many people because of 2 weeks of quarantine, but it’s quite a blessing to reunite with the people here. God is good, even if he did make bugs and mold just a bit too aggressive.