leslye’s nigeria journey

the moisture moment

June 1st, 2006

Nigeria was hot — in so many ways. One of them was obvious right off the bat: the weather. I have been in America’s version of really hot. I’m not talking about the clean, dry heat of the desert — if you ask me, this is the wimp definition of hot. I mean that dynamic duo of temperature and humidity that melts tar and hairdos and motivation. Try summer in New York. In Baltimore, North Carolina, Kentucky, Florida. OK, now take that up a few orders of magnitude. Then take yourself off the power grid. In the village, where generators are few and the hours they run even fewer, for most of the day there was no moving air, cold or otherwise. No ice. No relief. This made the occasional appearance of cold beer miraculous and the chance to duck into a temporarily air conditioned room more seductive than just about anything.

On the long, dusty treks to work on the library, I was often engaged in lovely talks with my new Nigerian friends. In my myopic American exuberance, I must admit I felt impatient when they were apparently unable to keep up the pace and the conversation simultaneously. A few slow-motion feet. A few-sentences pause. And so on. The journey of a thousand words both began and ended with a single step. And then I got it. Duh. In a strength-sapping environment, how smart it was to Just. Slow. Down.

So it went like this: Sweat was omnipresent. It dripped from your nose. Trickled down your neck. Put a sheen over your entire body. Wet down your clothes. Made an effective glue for the village sand to stick to your legs. And used up bandana after bandana after bandana.

By the time you went to bed, it might have cooled down just a tad. You might have taken a little tepid-water sponge bath. You might even be sleeping in a house with a six-pm-till-midnight generator and a room with a ceiling fan. Don’t get me wrong, it was still plenty hot. But you learned to identify every little data point on the continuum of hot, and the just-before-sleep hot wasn’t quite so…well, hot.

It was always slightly disorienting to open my eyes in the morning. What was different? Oh yeah, I was dry. Thus began the tiny daily window of non-sweat. If you kept your movements to a bare minimum, you could prolong this delicious state for a little while. But inevitably, the heat and humidity would come upon you. It happened in an instant. You could be brushing your teeth or pulling on your underwear. Waving good day to some village kids or taking the first bite of breakfast. One moment you were dry, the next you were soaked. This I came to call the Moisture Moment. And that’s how you knew your day in Nigeria had truly begun.

Entry Filed under: in the village, stories