Heat

When the heat first revved up, I was sleeping outside in my little walled in area, but that soon became unbearable. The mud walls seemed to absorb the heat of the day, thus creating a stuffy, stifling oven of an outdoor bedroom. I must interject here that I really like sleep. Give me 9-10 hours per night, a nap in the afternoon and I am the single most productive human being named Kate Van Roekel on the planet. As you can imagine the still, humid air produced not a full night’s restful sleep, but 9-10 hours of tossing, turning, sweating and cursing. Finally I gave in and decided to try sleeping in the back part of the concession with my sisters. I hesitated to do this because, as previously mentioned, the girls are loud, talkative types and they generally go to bed whenever they get tired of talking. But in the end, I decided that sacrificing 1 ½ hours or so of sleep time was better than suffering through night after maddening night at my house. For the first week or so that I slept with my sisters in our little mosquito net tent camp, the electricity in Bol was cut. With no television or light to keep them up, the girls crawled into their mosquito nets at about 9:00 and I got a week’s worth of cool, breezy sleep under the starry Bol sky. But, alas, the powers that be in Bol somehow got the electricity going again. Some idiot bought a TV for the girls (so now the men have one and the women have one) and my sisters took to watching Egyptian soap operas and Sudanese variety shows until 11:30. It’s very hard to sleep when there is a turban-clad Sudanese man yowling at you from a cheap Nigerian TV. Chadians have a habit of turning the volume of TVs, radio, tape players, etc all the way up just because they can. So, anyway, no sleep = irritable, snappy Kate. But, oh, victory is mine because last night, I discovered the perfect sleep place – under the big tree, on the other side of the bushes and guava trees from that wretched television – it’s breezy, it’s cool and it’s blessedly quiet and dark. The girls are a little miffed that I don’t want to sleep with them anymore, but they’ll get over it. I got a full night of wonderful sleep, it’s the last week of school and the mail run is coming tomorrow. I’m a happy camper.

Hope all is well for everyone back home. Thank you for all your great photos and letters and packages!

Love,

Kate