Heat

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Last night as I lay on top of my sheets, striped of everything except my boxers, I awoke in the middle of the night with to the most glorious sensation in the world: I was shivering! It was ever so faint and I was barely cold, but none-the-less, shivering! We're down at Cape Coast for a weekend break from the camp and I was enjoying the undescribable joy of sleeping under a working fan. The past week I had given up on the idea of even trying to remember what being cold felt like. Trying to get to sleep in our house in the camp is torture sometimes. No current (electricity) means no fan, and when there's no fan the air is dead still...not a breath. Usually as i lay in the feverish heat drifting in and out of sleep under the closterphobic confins of my mosquito net I catch myself dreaming that I just felt a draft of cold air on my sweat drenched back. But no, its just my sleep deprived, heat stoked mind playing cruel tricks on me. Laying in bed on these steamy, sticky nights my mind is my worst enemy.

But I really am having a great time! It gets very hard sometimes where all you want to do is be clean and not to sweat for just a little bit. But once you get used to be constantly sweaty from the moment you step out of the shower, from the moment you wake up, its not that bad. Plus everyone else is in the same boat so you don't have to worry about smelling because they're just as dirty!

Tomorrow I get down to real work and I kind of excited. I've been anxious to get down and get my hands dirty and feel like I'm actually doing something. Of course we have to get back to the camp first. Getting over here we had to jump through what I imagine are the typical hoops for travel in this part of the world. A group of us had negotiated a price to hire a tro-tro (a big mini-bus over-stuffed with way to many people), then after we had all piled smushed inside the driver told us to get out and get in the tro-tro sitting next to us that was falling apart because apparently he had negotiated a price for a tro-tro that wans't his (why he did this is?...well i just don't ask why, it keeps the blood presure down). Naturally we refused as we wanted to go in a tro-tro that was actually going to survive to the destination in one pice. So to make a long story short we sat baking in the sun skirming in our sweat negotiating for 15 min with lots of hands flying, yelling and such (I felt like i was back home again...though they arn't nearly as good actors here) then got out and found a new guy who would take us to a town in the opposit direction where upon we would catch another tro-tro for the Cape, nothing is simple here. I'm just glad we had a couple veterans with us to do all the talking, it makes it so much easier! Poor Malcom though, one of the volunteers, as we were switching tro-tros somebody swiped his digital camera...they are fast here!

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