Hometime, Downtime
Trip Start
Aug 01, 2008
1
33
63
Trip End
Jun 30, 2010
Pointe Noire,
Congo
Monday, November 3, 2008
This gave me time to clean my house. I feel as though I am regressing. With a full time maid/nanny I have grown some very bad habits. I never pick up after myself anymore. Clothes rarely find their way to the laundry basket, and although I do put dishes into the sink, I never do them during the week. Adele takes care of all of that for us! We usually do our dinner dishes and clean up after ourselves over the weekend, but I haven't touched a vacuum or broom since we've been here, I also have never once cleaned our bathrooms, I mean not unless there has been a poopy emergency. The clothes get washed and dried and ironed, the beds get made, and the groceries get bought and put away. And the thing is I think that Adele still has it pretty good compared to other "housewives" in town. Many of them cook three meals a day in addition and work more hours, and are expected to do overtime at parties and work Saturday mornings. We don't usually ask that much, but do occasionally pay her to babysit on a Saturday night if we are going out. But we usually try to get the kids fed, bathed and in bed before we go. I also help her out with prescription and over the counter drugs when she's sick, which hasn't been that often. And even when she has been sick, she hasn't missed a day of work. She got malaria last month and seemed just fine. When I offered her the day off, she refused.
We have had an on-going saga with the guards. A few weeks ago, as we were leaving to go to the beach with friends, I discovered one of them smoking pot in our back garden. Since I didn't really want to jump to any hasty decisions, I told David about it and we talked it over on our drive. We are not the type of people to rat others out or try to ruin someone's life over a bad choice. But in the end, we decided that because it's not just our residence, but also a school, we needed to let someone know. So when we got home, the guard had gone off shift, and I e-mailed Schlumberger and told them exactly what had happened, when it happened and gave the guards name. The security company immediately sent someone over and started accusing the guards on duty of getting high. The next morning the guilty guard showed up for work! Then I got an e-mail from Schlumberger warning me of the serious consequences of "false allegations" and how I can be dragged into court and sued! What a melodrama! If I'd known how it was going to be bungled, I would have just ignored him.
So then we were told that all the guards would have to be fired and replaced. This naturally sent our guards into a panic. We got various stories from our secretary, the guards and the company about what was actually happening. While our secretary assured us that they were being routinely "rotated" to other houses which happens every couple of months, the guards insisted that they were being canned. Meanwhile, the other Schlumberger employees were telling me that their guards have never been rotated. So the guards wanted us to help them keep working at our house, and the secretary was telling us to ignore the guards. So, On October 31, our favorite guard came to us and asked us to call his boss, or he was going to lose his job the next day. When pressed, he said that he would be rotated and also there would be a cut in pay. We made a call, and he remains. There are new guards replacing our other familiar faces and I hope to God they didn't get sacked. Since they all disappeared on the first of the month, I believe that they are probably just working at other houses. But things here work so differently that I just don't know. And I don't want to step on anyone's toes by insisting that we keep our guards if that's not how it's done.
I also bought my first bikini since having kids. The bathing suits here, or swimming costumes, as my students call them, are a fraction of the price they'd be in the states. Also, the esthetic around the pool is more, shall we say, continental. Bathing suits are seen as more functional and less a privilege of the super thin. Every guy, from the littlest to the biggest, sports a man-kini for sunbathing and swimming, and American style shorts are put on for playing in the sand or going to and from the car. The women are the same, young and old sport an honest to goodness two piece bikini, not a tankini. Cover-ups are there, but mostly there not. It's much less threatening than in the US where the teenage girls have all the fun and we older women are held captive by our embarrassment. No one really looks twice at your stretch marks or belly rolls. Bodies are less considered, less remarked upon. Bodies seem more appreciated for their uniqueness than their adherence to the norm. Here, everybody loves the pool; everybody loves to swim, what is there to get emotional about? So I have decided to go with the flow. My body is almost back to normal after the apocalypse of the baby-making years. And I look pretty good. The funny thing now is my luminous white belly and back, which have not seen the sun in my children's entire lives, now out there for the whole wide world to see, or if not the whole world, at least the folks I hang out with.
Our electricity continues to be an issue. Today we spent the day without electricity again after it went out in the middle of the night because after the electrician left, the generator started to smoke. He is rumored to be returning sometime today, but that is unlikely because almost no one ever shows up after the afternoon siesta, which lasts from 12:00 to about 3:00. So, in terms of getting stuff done, you have the morning, during which people will usually show up and actually work, provided they don't need any other tools, pieces, parts or helpers. The whole middle of the day is a wash, and the afternoon is only two hours, so what's the point of doing anything? We'll put it off until tomorrow. And so it goes. If you're the type-A, anal retentive personality, you might have quite a time dealing with it all. But we're swinging with it.
