Domestic matters

Life in this household is very casual and easy these days. Teaching is over for Lucy and she's officially on leave for the next term. Yves, whose work requires travel all over West Africa and as far as all his native Congo Kinshasa, requested that he stay put for December, so he's home all day too.

The interior is high, shiny, and cool.

The apartment is a wonderful space. Like every interior I've visited in Dakar, it has ceilings of around 18 feet. The plastered walls are painted with glossy paint in creamy white. The floors here are ceramic tile; some places have marble tile. Everything shines and retains the coolness. The electric lights are few—one small fluorescent overhead per room—and are used only when it's really dark outside…and when the electricity is not cut, which it is, unpredictably. A couple of days ago we experienced four or five cuts over the period of a few hours. Then we hastened to unplug the computers and refrigerator. Actually, that's about it: There are no washers, driers, dishwashers, or other major appliances to worry about.

Today the water is cut, but it didn't prevent my taking a shower and washing my hair this morning. Since there's no water heater in either of the bathrooms, the water is heated very hot in a big pot on the gas stove and carried to the bathroom, where it's poured into a big plastic tub, which it fills to abut 1/3 capacity. For ease of access the tub is place on another, inverted, tub, to raise it. Then, you can dilute it with as much cold water as required to bring it to a comfortable temperature.

Bathroom ready for my shower; blue tub of recently 
boiled water, 10 liter bottle of cold.

Stored water under the sink.

You have a little plastic tub with which to dump the water over you as you stand in the sunken, yard-square shower area with drain in the bathroom floor. When there's water, you can use the shower head for the cold water. When, as today, there is none, you carry a 10-liter bottle of saved-up tap water from the kitchen to mix with the hot. Because water outages are common, most families keep the bottles emptied of purchased, filtered drinking water and fill them from the tap for just such purposes—showers, dishes, and the laundry.

There's nothing exceptional about having no kitchen storage; Lucy has a nice kitchen by any standards I've experienced. The small gas range is powered by bottled gas, which one turns on and off as needed to start or stop the flame that is lit by a match.

The kitchen. Gas tank to right of the stove.

They have a modern refrigerator/freezer. The freezer is where they keep bags with any trash (shrimp shells, melon rinds, garlic peels) that might attract the indomitable, almost microscopic ants that are a fact of life everywhere. Trash collection is not as routine or simple as it is back home (you wait for the truck and run out with the trash; there's no dumpster at your building), so Yves discovered this method for keeping stink and ants at bay until the truck shows up.

I don't remember myself when I'm home, how different domestic routines are here, and how much less convenient. True, Lucy has a housemaid who comes weekly to clean the apartment and to wash all the clothes (except the underwear, which we're expected to do for ourselves). But even then, the maid will do the laundry on a scrub board in a tub and hang it on a line in the courtyard to dry.

I do not, however, find myself feeling sorry for anyone, or wishing for Lucy and Yves to come back to save themselves from an inadequate lifestyle. This life is so relaxed and, above all, quiet for the lack of "conveniences." At least for me, it's very calming even to have no washing machine. It's lack simplifies the idea of what I will wear, how much I need, how long I'll wear it, what "dirty" and "clean" mean…A lot of assumptions that waste time and effort go out the window lacking the machinery of convenience—or, at least, we have to remember that convenience always has a context.