The Heat

The heat is unbearable.  It is like being fried.  Most of the time we are inside where the temperature without air-conditioning day and night is a steady 90 degrees  (32).  In Georgia I used to measure the extent of my chest infection / colds by how many packets of hankies I got through in a day.  (“I’m down t 4 a day now!” But here it is the number of showers I take in a day.  In the SVP flat I was on at least 7 a day – I even got up in the middle of the night to have a shower and spent my time in the flat wrapped in my sheet.  Actually, I did that because the other volunteer was doing the same but it turned out that that was a special sarong she had brought with her for that very purpose and so I must have seemed very strange to be wearing my bed clothes all day and night.

If we come back to the flat in the middle of the day the first thing we do is to switch on the air-con in the bedroom (used as a treat), plus the fan, get naked, cold shower, don’t dry and lay on the bed in icy ecstasy.  It is of course short-lived but it’s what keeps me going from stepping out of the taxi, crossing over the busy road and making our way up to the third floor.

The water here is never cold.  It comes from a water tank on top of the building and depending on when in the day you shower it will range from tepid to hot.  The best time for a cold shower is at 5 in the morning as this is the longest time the tank has not been exposed to the sun.  The water is cool. 

The same thing goes for water for drinking.  We freeze bottles of water and then it stays reasonably cold for a while but at night, if we leave a bottle by the bed, by morning it is quite warm.  In fact I have drunk colder tea.

In my first few days here, even though I was drinking a lot of water, I nearly passed out through the heat when walking. My head would start to feel really heavy and I would get lights before my eyes and I just had to get out of the sun (we were mostly walking in shade) and sit down.  It’s a different matter when you are on holiday and you sit in the shade reading your book and drinking cold beer and you wonder how people can actually do the housework or shopping in this heat.  We can do nothing.  However after a week my body adjusted to the heat somewhat and I was down to 4 showers a day!  I think school starts early and so this wont be too bad when we are finally placed in schools.

The other thing is that most of the side roads are unmade which means that there is a lot of sand around.  You know what it’s like when you walk on a hot beach, barefoot?  Well it is a similar effect when you are wearing sandals here with the sand flicking up under your feet.