It’s been a quiet and rainy Sunday, nothing extraordinarily special or productive about it. I fell asleep yesterday at 5pm, a runaway attempt at an afternoon nap, and woke up an hour before midnight, Cameroonian time. After a quixotic attempt to figure out which adapter would fit in the unfamiliarly shaped outlet in my room, (quixotic as in, running headlong into it with various adapters until one fit. None of them did perfectly, but Jim, the manager, assures me with a smile that any of them should work. Sigh). I read a little bit, then went back to sleep from 4 to 9am. I managed to sleep through the morning call to prayer and the buzz of hundreds of students waking up (the Presbyterian mission school, a large multi-building complex, is literally within a stone’s throw from my window). After a drizzly walk into town, I learned that most stores, the market, and Duke & Harvey’s restaurant were closed, probably for Sunday. A local man assured me that most of them would be open again at 2pm, but by that time, I was comfortable with my books under the mosquito net, and the rain had swelled to a voluptuous shower (to steal a line from Nabokov).
Woke up again at 8pm. It seems every night brings new creatures into my room. Last night it was a decent sized cockroach, and tonight I discovered a leech lazing in my sink. I have no idea how he got there, but if I had to guess, I would have to say he crawled up the plumbing. I sprayed some insect repellant on him and tossed him in the toilet, the final resting place for most of my visitors.
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