Lower Expectations

Being the only day off, Sunday is the day I take care of chores like doing laundry. Here, doing laundry means actually washing every piece of my clothes by hand. When I have to put in the hard labor, what goes in the laundry is determined by the smell test: if I hold it near my nose, do I feel like my breakfast is making its way up? Yes – it goes to the laundry; yes, but just a little – it can probably be worn at home for another day; no – it’s as good as fresh. I know, it’s a bit like back in college again.

As I sit by the faucet in the court yard washing my laundry, Alice the cook expresses her surprise that I know how to wash clothes by hand. “If I don’t know how to wash my clothes by now, I’m in real big trouble,” I tell her.

People here seem to be surprised by what I can and would do. Besides my laundry skills, people also seem to be surprised that I would eat on a daily basis nshima, the local staple food, and all the various leaves and other foods the locals eat, and that I can take cold showers in the morning. What kind of spoiled foreigners had come to stay here before? What do the locals expect of foreigners? Whatever it is, the expectations seem to be pretty low. I am glad to see it doesn’t take much to impress them. Thank you, my predecessors who had come before me and set the bar so low.