Week 3

It’s Friday night and I am sitting in my room after what ended up being a long, taxing week. I’ve decided that I want to write about the “conveniences” of American life and the lack of any sort of easy living in Cape Verde. I would like to begin with a disclaimer: I love this place. I love the people. I love everything about this experience, but I would pay a lot of money (which I don’t have) for a really nice, long, warm shower.

I think I’ve noted before that I live in a beautiful home. In fact, I live in the biggest house in my town. My family used to be well off and they are still fairly wealthy by Cape Verdan standards. HOWEVER, they do not have running water. Most homes have a tank on the roof (beton) of their homes. These tanks typically fill up in the rainy season and are used all year long. We have a tank on our roof and ostensibly this tank supplies water to our home. There is no such thing as city water (there are water trucks that bring purchased water to homes, if you can afford it). There are also public wells where women fill buckets and carry water to their homes on a daily basis (these are the women you see in National Geographic carrying huge buckets of water up the side of the mountain). At any rate, the cleanliness of the water depends on the cleanliness of your water tank. NOW, in my estimation, the water tanks are probably pretty disgusting. I have been tempted on occasion to walk up and look into the water tank, but I have talked myself out of it several times on account of the fact that I might be horrified by what I see. You see, if a water tank collects rain water, then said water tank does not have a cover. If there is no way to cover the water, then the one million bugs I have seen in the air probably make their way into the water supply on occasion. Not to mention the fact that the water tank is probably never cleaned. This all leads me to believe that not looking in the water tank is a great idea!

Okay, here’s how it all works around here. We have a water tank that theoretically supplies water for our home; however, we have a hose running from the water tank on the roof to a big barrel (pidon) in our kintal (a kintal is a large open space in the center of the house where people take showers, do laundry, men shave, do dishes, etc.). This big barrel is basically the main water container for all water needs. If I need to take a bath in the morning, I go to the pidon with my bath bucket and fill er up! I then get the kettle (buldi) and either heat it on the stove or I use a heating element that plugs into the wall and quickly heats the water. Some days I come home from running and my grandmother (vovo) has my hot water ready to add to the cold bucket water, and some days I have to do this myself. Mostly they do everything for me, so I’ve got it pretty good around here.

Now on to taking a bath. I am lucky enough to use my grandmothers’ bathroom, where we have a bathtub and shower curtain. We also have nice faucets, but no water! The rest of my family either bathes in the kintal, out in the open, or they bathe in one of the other bathrooms with a drain on the floor (there is no real showering area in the other bathrooms, you just take one over the drain). I am extremely thankful that I get to use the “nice” bathroom because I am not real keen on the idea of taking a shower in the nude in front of my family (as my host-mother does about twice a week). At any rate, you can imagine what it’s like without running water (I hope). To flush the toilet, you take a small bowl and pour water down the drain to create flow in the toilet. When you wash your hands or face, you plug the sink, fill it with a little bit of water and wash until you’re clean.

It’s been very different but a great lesson in water conservation. Everyone is very conscious of their water use and electricity use. There are rarely lights on in a home during the day. In fact, it would be odd to have a light on when it is daylight. At school I’ve never seen a light turned on. They work, but we don’t use them. Even if the room is dim, no one even thinks of wasting power. As Americans we absolutely abuse our energy resources. We leave on televisions (John Austin) and we leave on lights when we aren’t home. The Cape Verdans would never even think of such. They exist in a world where everything is precious. When they eat food, they eat every part of the food, there remains very little at the end of the meal. I feel badly when we eat fish and I haven’t cleaned mine down to the bones. They eat the eyeballs of the fish and the fins and everything. And what they don’t eat, they feed to the pigs in the morning. That’s right, the pigs. In the back of our house, we have a large area for animals. We have pigs and dogs tied up out back! We eat the pigs, but not the dogs. People in Cape Verde have dogs tied up in their homes often. They don’t play with these dogs nor give them any attention at all. I think people just have them because they think they’re supposed to. It’s very, very odd. I haven’t gotten a straight answer about it. We have a house dog (fofusha), but that is a rare occurrence here. Okay, now I’m off on a tangent! I’ll end here by saying good night. I have been in Cape Verde for nearly three weeks! Can you believe it???? Txau, ti logu.

p.s. If you have not read “The Sex Lives of Cannibals,” you definitely should. I just finished it and it is great. The author does a nice job characterizing life on an island in the Pacific Ocean. There are MANY, MANY parallels to my life here in Cape Verde. It’s funny, and you’ll get a sense of what I go through!