Butters, who often self-identifies as a delicate flower with all the arrogance of a young white American male, had long worried me with his penchant for standing with one hand supporting his fractured rib. The thought of the long (but mainly smooth) drive to and from our retreat location added to this worry. Luckily, Butters is strong (and usually silent – except about stupid things) and he (along with Carrottop) even managed to catch or recover my truly miserable Frisbee throws – despite looking like Napoleon caught in a nightmare of taking a left turn at Albuquerque on his way to the Battle of the Waterloo and finding himself in swim trunks in the middle of a lake.
Upon arrival at the border, he introduced the topic of our water situation, which is his equivalent of retirement planning. I’d naturally been thinking about this for weeks (especially since Timbit was due to return from her vacation soon) and had some ideas, but Butter’s involvement at this stage was truly a sign of our mental compromises as roommates.
At home, I quickly revised every good opinion I’d ever had of him, ever, in the history of all time.
I’d been saving up our dirty dishes for The Phoenix, whom I’d expected once a week as usual. Shortly before leaving, I’d found that Butters had given him the day off. He calmly advised me to just leave the dishes as we didn’t have much water anyway, and I was too stressed about the upcoming retreat to argue. His impulses to give days off and relieve me of housekeeping duties were kind and generous and meant that we had two weeks’ worth of rotting Tupperware to deal with when we got home.
Our water and power situation are, as always, close to being impossible without actually ever hitting that threshold. For example, we would get water in our tank about once every two weeks, and the power was mainly off in the evenings until 10pm. It would flash briefly at around 6:30 as usual just so that I would scream, and then disappear again. It now manages to stay on for roughly half an hour, during which I desperately heat water and charge all the appliances that are to keep me going for the next three hours. Added to the solar-powered lights in our living room and kitchen, the situation is entirely survivable.
And so damn irritating.
Captain and Carrottop have even worked out an arrangement with our landlord so that we supposedly get five bidons of water a day. This is a goldmine in an apartment building where Ms. Second-and-Third Floor Housekeeping ties ten empty bidons to her head and shuffles sideways down the narrow hallway to the door of our apartment building in order to go hunt water in the mornings.
For us, this means that our landlord’s three housemaids (they hire more in order to waste more water washing things – which is vital to respectable existence here) and his two daughters demand cookies from us at all times and in all places (his son will join in the fun when he is able to talk and climb the stairs) and give us water when they want.
One of the housemaids asked me to take her to where I was born. Assuming she meant Canada, I teasingly asked what she’d do in India.
“I’ll be your slave!”
Good feelings gone.
They have now taken to exploring the apartment in roving packs, a practice which I detest and, as usual, can trace back to Butters. I have usually been careful to stop the maids and the children at the door, only share sweets for special occasions, and generally draw a line to indicate my space and my resources. One night, while I was hiding in plain view on the couch and desperately praying that Butters would not let them in, he did. My arms were suddenly filled with a book on leadership and a small, scrubby-headed cutie who shrieked the same thing she shrieks every single time she sees me: “You have beautiful hair!”
She then explored my room, shrieking ecstatically, “She has a mosquito net!” and other such nonsense while Butters hid in his room like a traitorous gerbil. As I finally herded them to the door, the little girl turned to face me and ask seriously, “Each one has their own room?”
“Yes,” both Butters and I answered definitively before I shut the door in their sweet faces.
And now we have set a precedent – not only can they demand anything they want when we return from grocery shopping or work or church, but they can also enter the house and search the premises without a warrant. One afternoon, both the little girls jumped on my bed in their outside clothes, and asked for something, anything.
“I want this… and this…” said the elder decisively, indicating a bag of whole-wheat pasta and some baguettes. “And I’ll be back for this,” she promised, lovingly petting a Pringles container.
In severe distress at my consistent refusals to give them food that didn’t belong to me, they desperately demanded the bottle of water I had in my hands.
Being generally of the mindset that children should be seen and not heard – polite at the very least – this was an affront to my sensibilities. Grandma and Grandpa generously welcome the children of their apartment building whenever they show up – not saying a word - with outstretched hands, but this is beyond me. Being grandparents (and reasonable) they look within and call it love; I look into round, thickly-lashed eyes and call it rude with a dash of entitlement. Filling the outstretched hands of well-to-do children or well-dressed pedestrians who ask for $10 for food or phone credits or bus fare stands in complete opposition to everything graffiti’d on my soapbox. Our landlord has some sort of business, his wife works, and he collects over $600USD/mo from our apartment alone – none of this is to say that he doesn’t need money or that he isn’t generous with his family or friends or church, but his children likely do not want for anything. These demands are indicative of a wider mindset – the kids don’t ask treats from other neighbours, but the ‘white’ people must give something. Instead of promoting learning and interdependence, foreigners continue to foster the parasitism that Mobutu suggested: steal a little bit, don’t call it stealing, and watch as an entire nation caves in.
“Yeah, so what about turbo?” I was once casually asked at work.
What.
“Your turbo!”
Is this what our pump is called? We could probably have made do with older model: ‘Adequate - in the presence of water.’
“What do you think about him?”
That he is likely not our water pump.
“Your prime minister!
Having seen the alternative, I admitted that - while he wasn’t getting me water any faster - my Trudeau was doing a fairly good job.
Upon arrival at the border, he introduced the topic of our water situation, which is his equivalent of retirement planning. I’d naturally been thinking about this for weeks (especially since Timbit was due to return from her vacation soon) and had some ideas, but Butter’s involvement at this stage was truly a sign of our mental compromises as roommates.
At home, I quickly revised every good opinion I’d ever had of him, ever, in the history of all time.
I’d been saving up our dirty dishes for The Phoenix, whom I’d expected once a week as usual. Shortly before leaving, I’d found that Butters had given him the day off. He calmly advised me to just leave the dishes as we didn’t have much water anyway, and I was too stressed about the upcoming retreat to argue. His impulses to give days off and relieve me of housekeeping duties were kind and generous and meant that we had two weeks’ worth of rotting Tupperware to deal with when we got home.
Our water and power situation are, as always, close to being impossible without actually ever hitting that threshold. For example, we would get water in our tank about once every two weeks, and the power was mainly off in the evenings until 10pm. It would flash briefly at around 6:30 as usual just so that I would scream, and then disappear again. It now manages to stay on for roughly half an hour, during which I desperately heat water and charge all the appliances that are to keep me going for the next three hours. Added to the solar-powered lights in our living room and kitchen, the situation is entirely survivable.
And so damn irritating.
Captain and Carrottop have even worked out an arrangement with our landlord so that we supposedly get five bidons of water a day. This is a goldmine in an apartment building where Ms. Second-and-Third Floor Housekeeping ties ten empty bidons to her head and shuffles sideways down the narrow hallway to the door of our apartment building in order to go hunt water in the mornings.
For us, this means that our landlord’s three housemaids (they hire more in order to waste more water washing things – which is vital to respectable existence here) and his two daughters demand cookies from us at all times and in all places (his son will join in the fun when he is able to talk and climb the stairs) and give us water when they want.
One of the housemaids asked me to take her to where I was born. Assuming she meant Canada, I teasingly asked what she’d do in India.
“I’ll be your slave!”
Good feelings gone.
They have now taken to exploring the apartment in roving packs, a practice which I detest and, as usual, can trace back to Butters. I have usually been careful to stop the maids and the children at the door, only share sweets for special occasions, and generally draw a line to indicate my space and my resources. One night, while I was hiding in plain view on the couch and desperately praying that Butters would not let them in, he did. My arms were suddenly filled with a book on leadership and a small, scrubby-headed cutie who shrieked the same thing she shrieks every single time she sees me: “You have beautiful hair!”
She then explored my room, shrieking ecstatically, “She has a mosquito net!” and other such nonsense while Butters hid in his room like a traitorous gerbil. As I finally herded them to the door, the little girl turned to face me and ask seriously, “Each one has their own room?”
“Yes,” both Butters and I answered definitively before I shut the door in their sweet faces.
And now we have set a precedent – not only can they demand anything they want when we return from grocery shopping or work or church, but they can also enter the house and search the premises without a warrant. One afternoon, both the little girls jumped on my bed in their outside clothes, and asked for something, anything.
“I want this… and this…” said the elder decisively, indicating a bag of whole-wheat pasta and some baguettes. “And I’ll be back for this,” she promised, lovingly petting a Pringles container.
In severe distress at my consistent refusals to give them food that didn’t belong to me, they desperately demanded the bottle of water I had in my hands.
Being generally of the mindset that children should be seen and not heard – polite at the very least – this was an affront to my sensibilities. Grandma and Grandpa generously welcome the children of their apartment building whenever they show up – not saying a word - with outstretched hands, but this is beyond me. Being grandparents (and reasonable) they look within and call it love; I look into round, thickly-lashed eyes and call it rude with a dash of entitlement. Filling the outstretched hands of well-to-do children or well-dressed pedestrians who ask for $10 for food or phone credits or bus fare stands in complete opposition to everything graffiti’d on my soapbox. Our landlord has some sort of business, his wife works, and he collects over $600USD/mo from our apartment alone – none of this is to say that he doesn’t need money or that he isn’t generous with his family or friends or church, but his children likely do not want for anything. These demands are indicative of a wider mindset – the kids don’t ask treats from other neighbours, but the ‘white’ people must give something. Instead of promoting learning and interdependence, foreigners continue to foster the parasitism that Mobutu suggested: steal a little bit, don’t call it stealing, and watch as an entire nation caves in.
“Yeah, so what about turbo?” I was once casually asked at work.
What.
“Your turbo!”
Is this what our pump is called? We could probably have made do with older model: ‘Adequate - in the presence of water.’
“What do you think about him?”
That he is likely not our water pump.
“Your prime minister!
Having seen the alternative, I admitted that - while he wasn’t getting me water any faster - my Trudeau was doing a fairly good job.
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At the risk of sounding desperate - PLEASE WRITE TO ME!