A weekend of plenty; and if by plenty you mean: plenty of boubous, plenty of rain, plenty of slaughtered animal carcasses along the route nationale, (plenty of letting down your guard), as well as plenty of family, plenty of warmth, and generosity, and group snoozing, it makes for a kind of weird weekend. Well, only weird in the sense that you get so caught up in the fever of a holiday that’s quite foreign to you to begin with. And quite anticlimactic. Nothing gets done in the week before Korité, except Korité, but at the end of it all, most everyone seemed a little too worn out to make much of it. Stormy weather also always has a way of making the world feel a little unsettled; it’s the depression in air pressure that gives the atmosphere that nervous kind of edge. According to the calendar, we’re right at the tail end of the rainy season, l’hivernage, but it seems like the sky itself has got another, lingering, idea in mind.

Our water’s been cut out for two days now (although it came back for just long enough for me to shower under a pathetic trickle of water; let me self-pity for a second, it's my blog). Last night Cathi and I - ever industrious and giddy - were able to fill up some buckets of water at a neighbor’s house, and carry them back on our heads … did we ever turn a few heads! Sometimes I feel like toubabs (white people) are just purely comical to Africans. I suppose it’s very common for foreigners to come here and, at least once in a while, feel way less self-sufficient than they'd like to be. (AH! water water halleluja … I'm stealing away for a moment to wash vegetables while the glorious flow lasts).

Before I returned with this big bowl of carrots and avocados and tomatoes, and beans … (for one reason or another I’ve been living on white bread and rice for a few days. I can’t help but feel a deep gratification in saying, the bakers are on strike) I think I was going to make some point about how darn funny we are - sunburned and miscommunicating - navigating our way through a society that’s not terribly open-minded and but has nonetheless a sense of humor. Often at our expense … you’d laugh too. (One of my girlfriends, Leah, - gallant in her stabs at Gambian Wolof - somehow misconstrued “are you married?” with “do you pleasure your wife?” ) It’s humbling, a little.

But before I get too far off the topic of water … I want to make a point to say that it is so, so, so, so precious. You think about these things when you go without. And while we can bear the loss for a couple days, while our dishes pile up in the sink, while we can’t sufficiently wash vegetables, while we empty bottles of sanitizer on our hands in lieu of soap and water - for just a few days - we never the less get a glimpse of the aggravation of a problem that is very grave and growing in magnitude. There are close to 2 billion people who live without access to safe drinking water, right now, who live in a state of what the UN calls a “moderate to sever water crisis.” (I was curious, had to google it when the power came back on, haha). Oh man, the luxuries we don’t even think about. Who ever thinks about water as a luxury, let alone a human right?