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Published: March 7th 2010
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Scenic swimming pool
Aldayer and Boe keeping cool in the wash bucket. hey all-
my mother is nudging me to get another blog published for this week, which is probably a good thing since i almost forgot. midterms this week have had me busy studying indeed. nothing like 5 tests to prepare for. might be a couple weeks before i get another published since we'll be on the slopes (!!!) i can't wait! can you tell? enjoy - b
14 January 2010
It’s been hot. I’m not talking about the kind of hot that you make small talk about with the neighbors. I’m talking about miserable, inescapable, sweat in your sleep, life stifling heat. There is no need to small talk about this heat, it’s the only thing on peoples’ minds. You just look at the sweat on their brow and upper lip, triggered from just the very act of being alive, and you don’t have to chat about it. That would make the both of you sweat more. The humidity, too, is so high that it hasn’t rained in about five days, but every morning the grass is covered in sizeable droplets of dew.
I urge my readers to realize, this is not the heat that you can hide
Our happy bubble
pulling a small breeze off the ocean... from. One summer in my college days, trying to save money on house bills, my roommates and I decided to not turn the air conditioner on until 5:00 each night. When I was home for lunch and or in the afternoons, I would feel hot, and could park it in front of an electric fan. I could spend full afternoons browsing in Wal-Mart, just to take advantage of the complimentary air-conditioning. And at least at night, my body cooled off enough to sleep.
No such option here; Sam’s Choice hasn’t yet found Maewo. Justin did have the foresight to buy a small electric fan while we were in Australia. This he has hooked up to the solar panel through an inverter. It is the most fantastic thing about life as I know it right now. The only catch is, it automatically shuts itself off after about ten minutes and only holds enough charge for about an hour’s worth of fanning. Strategically, he has strung the fan up inside the mosquito net around our bed. That means we have about an hour’s worth of ten minute intervals after the sun goes down to keep ourselves from having a horrible nights’
Cool Reading
Justin attempting to read and stay cool at the same time. His only complaint was the difficulty of turning pages through the Ziploc bag. sleep. When one of us wakes with sweat drenching our pillow, we’ll hustle to get the fan turned back on before the other wakes to the same, demoralizing reality. Oh me, oh life.
During the day, our house heats up like an oven. The copper roof just attracts it. At first, we just swam often and then laid on our cement floor, trying to absorb the coolness of the ground, scraping up our sweaty backs to move ten inches over to the next fresh, cool spot. Justin swims so frequently that he puts baby powder on his shoulders to keep them dry. Otherwise, they scratch and, I’m fairly certain, would develop some type of fungus or mold. I have an annoying patch of heat rash on my inner forearm. We try not to use the stove for too long at a time because that just adds to the daunting, unmovable presence of heat.
Not a lot happens when it is this hot. On a rather productive day, I may get up first thing in the morning and mix myself a Gatorade to have by my side while I do laundry before the sun dominates the yard. Still I sweat buckets. Then (mind you, this is a productive day) I would go for a long swim to cool off and walk up to my host family’s house for the afternoon to play cards. By the time I get there, I’m sweating again, but at least for those few minutes under the water I was cooler. That would be the extent of my day and I would be exhausted.
We’re not alone in our lack of productivity. Even some of the hard driven workers make the hike to the garden only to realize they are too hot and thirsty to do any work. Lots of time is spent by the “solwota” where a breeze has been known to stir few sweaty hairs off your head. One day, Justin and I were just coming back after being camped out at our beach for a few hours when he got an idea. In what I thought may have been a delusional frenzy induced by heat, he headed into the bush that is between our house and the ocean with his bush knife, rambling about an extra mosquito net and mat. About an hour later, he came back covered in mosquito bites and, obviously, sweat, and sat himself right down under a stream of fresh water coming from our pipe. He had just cut a trail to a little secluded spot that we had used before to picnic on the beach. No one had been that way in months, and with the prime greenhouse like conditions, the plants just take over. The next day, after taking care of any chores first thing in the morning, he planned to pack us off to this spot with enough food, water, and amenities to keep us happy for hours.
When I got there, I could see why. The spot was jutting out just a tad on the ocean, so we potentially had breeze coming from three sides. Justin strung up our extra mosquito net, a mat, sheets, and pillows, along with our books and snacks (good snacks too, as care packages from home keep us nice and stocked up!), went inside. And here we camped for the morning and into the afternoon. When the sun was right above us, the heat infiltrated our happy little bubble and we left it for a swim. But, that is our special little morning escape for now.
Today, it rained, which is the only reason that I have enough gumption to write this. The air cooled a bit a few minutes before the shower and it felt like magic. The locals say the reason we have this stifling heat is because it is cyclone season. In the event of a cyclone, the heat would subside, at least temporarily. But, the custom men on the island have blocked cyclones from hitting Maewo. Everyone seems more willing to cope with the heat than the wrath of a cyclone. I suppose this is true for me as well.
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