Little Luxuries

Living in a different country is kind of like traveling except when the newness and excitement wears off, you’re still there. So what can you do but settle into your old patterns from home, as well as you can in this new environment. When things seem unbearably different (cold showers at night when the power occasionally goes out) or just plain repetitive and boring you have to throw in a few luxuries – you can only forgo a shower so many days in a row. But here’s the catch – when I was getting ready to leave for Rwanda, I assumed I would just live without certain luxuries for a year, so now I have to figure out the best approximation. Let me give you some examples:

Manicure – after washing laundry by hand until your hands are raw, put on some moisturizing cream
Pedicure – exfoliation in the vain hope of removing (seemingly permanent) red dirt stains from feet and ankles
Hair cut – cutting split ends with swiss army knife scissors, using blank computer screen as mirror (benefit of no real mirror is no real idea if the quality of cut, though semi-serrated edges of blades seem to have added some nice texture)
Perfume – best used to help cover questionable smell that permeates clothes that sit in the closet too long (no cedar panels here!)
Dessert – one or two squares of a chocolate bar (and this is the one habit I’m trying to break since it’s – relatively – expensive!)or apples imported from South Africa
Vegging Out – watching an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy in a weekend (in fairness, it was pouring rain out) – ok that one’s not even that much of a change…
Roomies – Like to pop up unannounced in the evening just to see how the day went, give me an audience for venting, etc... And I mean literally, pop up – as they’re frogs. (Yup, raining season brings more than rain.) I’ve had more than a few little ones (only about an inch) show up in my house, just suddenly be there chilling in the corner. These can be ushered out with a stern word and a light prod from my foot (in a sneaker). But then there was the toad – about as big as my hand – that took cover from torrents in my bathroom (an understandable confusion of habitat since it’s pretty dark and damp there most of the time). He was quite comfortable and seemed to think we could share the space. So we did a little waltz around the room (me with a mop) until I had him back by the open door, at which point he happily relinquished the bathroom.