The other day, someone asked me how things were going in Liberia; I described it as an "opportunity to do things like cook and read and decorate and hum."
I was immediately horrified.
Unless you're blessed with a short memory span, there isn't a ton to do here for the 0-99 age group so when I moved into my new digs last week, I just about burst with glee.
Swimming pool. Exercise room. Uninterrupted power. A waffle iron. Washer and dryer. An oven that isn't trying daily to set me on fire.
So now I get a real kick out of watering plants and baking cookies and hanging pics and barbecues. I don't know if -- in the parallel life I'm living somewhere in the States --this would have happened anyway, this...softening.
Yuck.
A younger version of me is turning in her grave.
The softening (yuck) only happens within the confines of my house, where everything is clean and safe and beautiful; where I can choose whether the hammock overlooks the palm treetops of the Lutheran compound or the real world.
The real world is a place where you go to an interview that should be in the bag but isn't because you're the wrong gender and ethnicity. (This, in an African country with a woman president.) The real world entails sprinting from the supermarket door to your car and still not beating the blind old man and his cherubic guide as they plead with you to help wi' sunting, Ma. The real world requires gesticulating, armed only with your best Liberian English, on Center Street at the amputee who has voluntarily "cleaned" your car. In the real world, friends' laptops get fished through the bars of their bedroom windows or plucked from coffee tables as they sleep. The real world is mud, potholes and car repairs. It is sending your curtains back to the tailor three times because he can't read his writing because he can't read or write. It is averting your eyes from the child excreting a few yards away. It is giving directions that include the words "...go over the Chinese bridge along the poo-poo beach..." because absolutely everybody knows it used to be the most public of public toilets. Locking the car door before you've closed it; putting your purse on the floor and not the passenger seat; watching the meter at the gas pump because rumor has is Super Petroleum will cheat you-oh; making acquaintances who turn cold when you return from abroad empty-handed; having your accent mocked before you're out of earshot; never knowing how much things really cost because you look like you could use a good fleecing. The real world has public schools with four-hour days that offer little more than babysitting and free lunch; it pushes hills of trash from the main road to one just out of the way.
So I'll keep my postwar America illusion and go soft and domestic in my nest: outside, out there, I'm a machine.
I was immediately horrified.
Unless you're blessed with a short memory span, there isn't a ton to do here for the 0-99 age group so when I moved into my new digs last week, I just about burst with glee.
Swimming pool. Exercise room. Uninterrupted power. A waffle iron. Washer and dryer. An oven that isn't trying daily to set me on fire.
So now I get a real kick out of watering plants and baking cookies and hanging pics and barbecues. I don't know if -- in the parallel life I'm living somewhere in the States --this would have happened anyway, this...softening.
Yuck.
A younger version of me is turning in her grave.
The softening (yuck) only happens within the confines of my house, where everything is clean and safe and beautiful; where I can choose whether the hammock overlooks the palm treetops of the Lutheran compound or the real world.
The real world is a place where you go to an interview that should be in the bag but isn't because you're the wrong gender and ethnicity. (This, in an African country with a woman president.) The real world entails sprinting from the supermarket door to your car and still not beating the blind old man and his cherubic guide as they plead with you to help wi' sunting, Ma. The real world requires gesticulating, armed only with your best Liberian English, on Center Street at the amputee who has voluntarily "cleaned" your car. In the real world, friends' laptops get fished through the bars of their bedroom windows or plucked from coffee tables as they sleep. The real world is mud, potholes and car repairs. It is sending your curtains back to the tailor three times because he can't read his writing because he can't read or write. It is averting your eyes from the child excreting a few yards away. It is giving directions that include the words "...go over the Chinese bridge along the poo-poo beach..." because absolutely everybody knows it used to be the most public of public toilets. Locking the car door before you've closed it; putting your purse on the floor and not the passenger seat; watching the meter at the gas pump because rumor has is Super Petroleum will cheat you-oh; making acquaintances who turn cold when you return from abroad empty-handed; having your accent mocked before you're out of earshot; never knowing how much things really cost because you look like you could use a good fleecing. The real world has public schools with four-hour days that offer little more than babysitting and free lunch; it pushes hills of trash from the main road to one just out of the way.
So I'll keep my postwar America illusion and go soft and domestic in my nest: outside, out there, I'm a machine.
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