Vignettes of Ebolowa (Part Two)

I can't help bit wonder sometimes if a person resents me for what I have or what my life was like before coming here. The other day while doing laundry, Brice's girlfriend made a comment about ,me along the lines of, "She's doing it wrong. She's not used to washing clothes by hand because they have machines in the U.S." I admitted that she was right--I was in middle school the last time I washed an article of clothing by hand. But I still wonder if she was simply making an observation (Cameroonians are known to be fond of a grammatical tense known as the "present obvious"), or if there was a shade of jealousy to her tone. And how could I blame her? I our roles were reversed, and I were a nineteen-year-old Cameroonian with one child, another on the way, and endless days of toil ahead, I'm sure I would resent an American with an education, opportunities, and more clothes in her closet than in a house of nine Cameroonians.

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Tonight I had my first hot bath since arriving in Ebolowa. Perhaps I imagined it, but I could have sworn the water smelled of wood smoke after being heated over an open fire.
It was absolutely luxurious scrubbing off mud stains and salty sweat residue with the almost-too-hot water, and it was all the more satisfying knowing that I had carried it myself from the well back to the house, a ten-liter jug balanced precariously atop my head. Almost like an African.