Bed Sheets

Thursday, July 27, 2006

As I just sit here, I am sweating. The past 72 nights (minus 5 when I was out of town) in which I have been in Dakar I have sweated. If I’m not sweating, then I know something is wrong.

With that being said, as I think I have said before, the sheets on my bed probably needed a good washing a long time ago. In college, I was pretty good about keeping the sheets washed, clean, and sweat free. Typically, about every month they got thrown in the washer.

Well, things are a little different here and I have had to do what the higher ups at Peace Corps call “adaptation”. I still do my laundry in a washing machine, but in order to utilize this luxury, I have had to “adapt” and go to Libertie VI (Dakar Regional House), about 2 miles from my house to do it. It is a rough life I tell ya.

I try not to go there to often, unless I am going to do laundry, which is about once every two weeks. For some reason, the washing machine takes close to 2 hours for one cycle and the drier I don’t think works. As a result, I don’t like to take up a good portion of my day doing laundry.

Well, that all changed on Wednesday afternoon when I had to drop some stuff off at the Regional House. I had the novel idea, that since I had just washed my clothes a few days before, I would strip my bed and pillows and wash my sheets. It was a pretty big accomplishment.

The one problem I came across was that by the time my load of laundry was done, it was nearly dark and by the time I could make it home it would be dark. Laundry does not dry when it is dark as I found out around 11:00 pm when I was about to crawl into bed. My sheets were quite yet. The pretty boy in me came out when I decided that I wasn’t going to sleep on just the mattress. So, I decided to use two soft mats that I have, placed them on the floor, and then put my Thermarest pad on top of that, and I just slept on the floor.

It wasn’t very comfortable and I woke up several times, but that is no different than any other night. In the earliest of science classes, they always tell you that heat rises. That may be true, but not in Senegal. It was just as hot on the floor.

I never thought I would stoop this low and write about my sweat stained bed sheets but I’m running out of topics and there is a good chance I will write about the same thing in four months.

I feel dumber for writing this.