African Ant Armageddon

After arriving at our house, our social sponsors offered to give us a quick tour and then, knowing we were exhausted, get out of our hair and let us settle in. Actually, the exact words Emily used were “leave you to grieve”, which made me laugh. And so began the process of figuring out this house and how to live here. The kids were hungry, and I was so so grateful for the casserole already in the fridge. Wonderful, I thought, all I have to do is pop it in the oven. But as I stared at the 11 symbols for 11 different settings on the oven, I realized I had no idea how to use this thing. My brain was shot from getting less than one hour of sleep in the last 28 hours or so. But I finally figured out which picture was the setting that I wanted and then turned to the temperature dial. And realized it was in Celsius. Damn. Pulled out my phone to do a quick Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion…and realized I had neither cell signal nor Wi-fi. DAMN IT. There have been many days like this over the past month, the simplest of tasks suddenly turning into a complex operation requiring way too much brain power.

I knew there would be plenty to learn in Africa, but I didn’t realize our house itself would come with such a steep learning curve. After finally getting a full night’s sleep, I awoke the next morning ready for a shower. Aha! Our master bedroom shower looks positively luxurious! Not one, but TWO shower heads! A stand in shower AND a shower/bath combo. I started with the stand alone shower (the one on the right in the photo below). And quickly realized that the shower floor is about one inch above the floor of the rest of the bathroom, with absolutely no barrier to keep the water in. Therefore, whenever this shower is turned on, ALL the water immediately pours onto the bathroom floor, thereby flooding the entire bathroom. Right. Never mind that shower, lets try the other one. In this one, I could not seem to get the water hot (operator error I later figured out). “This is Africa,” I told myself “suck it up and get used to uncomfortable.” So I held my breath and dove into my cold shower. Then the strangest thing happened. As I was mid rinse, eyes closed, the water suddenly just disappeared. I could hear the shower still on, but the water was no longer on me at all. What? What in the world? I managed to blink my eyes open and found that the shower head had flipped upward, all of its own accord, and that the water was now arcing beautifully above my head, into the stand up shower…and consequently all over the floor of the bathroom. Again. We have since learned that if the water pressure is not juuuust right, it causes the snake hose part leading up to the shower head to expand or contract, thereby causing the shower head to dance into odd positions. Sometimes it will just flip to the side and spray straight onto the bathroom floor. Sometimes up like it just did with me. Occasionally it will just crash right down onto the tub floor in dramatic fashion. Anyway, by the time I FINALLY finished my shower, I was utterly confused, laughing, freezing, and standing in an absolutely FLOODED bathroom. I had also decided that my luxury shower was not quite as luxurious as it looked.

And this, my friends, is the theme of the house. It LOOKS fantastic. And there are many things we love about it. Tons of square footage, plenty of space for us, lots of storage, all brand new furniture (that my kids will ruin and we will have to pay for). BUT, I don’t know if such things as building codes or inspections even exist in Ghana. And if they do, they are far, FAR beneath American standards. Nothing, and I mean nothing, works quite right.

There is a crack so big above our front door, you can clearly see the sky through it. Because of such cracks, so much humidity gets into the house that we have to empty gallons of water out of 2 different dehumidifiers multiple times a day. The dishwasher? Its considered a luxury to get a dishwasher in Africa, but the thing isn’t bolted in, and when you open the door all the way, it just about comes crashing on its face onto the floor, almost breaking all the dishes in the process.

The electrical wiring is wonky too. Desperate for a cup of coffee? The outlet we have the coffee machine plugged into frequently just trips itself off. Often mid coffee brewing. So you’ll turn the coffee pot on, and come back a few minutes later to find about 1/4 of the coffee brewed. Don’t worry, just push the reset button on the outlet and you’ll get the rest of the coffee…eventually. The water from the sinks? Not drinkable. There is a distiller in the kitchen that we have to use for all drinking water. We are not supposed to even rinse our toothbrushes using the faucet water! We are still working out a good system for keeping an adequate supply of drinking water on the 3rd floor where all the kid toothbrushes are, while the distiller is on the 1st floor. All of these nuances take some getting used to! One morning, as I was filling the coffee pot in the sink, Don caught me, saying, “you’re not making coffee with THAT water are you?” Oops. I proceeded to make what we now call “non-dysentery coffee” with my coffee pot and wonky outlet.

No such thing as central AC here, but don’t worry, there’s AC units in each individual room! They just each come with their own remote controls to work them, which our kids of course like to carry all over the house, so you can’t find one when you need to change the temperature. These also break frequently, and we have had to have 2 of them serviced multiple times already.

Need storage? Not to worry, we have a wall of cubbies, 24 of which have doors with 24 different locks and 24 different keys. I have NO answers for this one. I don’t know if this screams “luxury” to the Ghanaians or if someone just thought “you know, I bet I know what Americans REALLY love!” I don’t know how many hours over the next 2 years I will have to spend searching for keys or trying different keys in different locks, but I can tell you it will be entirely too many.

Laundry? Don’t worry, we still have a washer and dryer! They’re just…outside. Sort of. You walk through the garage to get to a little room with a dryer. Attached to that little room is an entirely different little room with a washing machine. And the door of THAT little room is one with slats that are just completely open to the outside air, no screen. Soooo…don’t forget about your laundry. If you do, it will either rot in the humidity or be covered in ants (the ants thing HAS already happened to us, yes).

And oh oh oh, the ants. They deserve a post in and of themselves. I call it African Ant Armageddon. They are the most aggressive, unrelenting, evil ants I have ever seen. They DO. NOT. STOP. By our second day here, they were crawling down from the ceiling, crawling in trails on the floor, and literally coming out of the walls. They fill up our microwave multiple times a day. They fill up drawers with NO food in them, crawling all over the measuring cups and spatulas for apparently no reason at all. If you don’t run the dishwasher at night, you will find the dishwasher FULL of them come morning. They have CHEWED THROUGH SEALED BAGS OF FOOD. More than once. We have to store most of our food in the fridge just to safeguard it from the ants. Dominic brought a piece of toast upstairs to our room one day (WHY OH WHY). The ants were not content to stay on the floor where the toast was, but indeed crawled all into the dressers. I had ants in my pants. Literally. Twice. And they bite. Cooking must be performed as a race against the ants, as I learned trying to make cookies one evening. About 10-15 minutes into the cooking, you start seeing the trails coming down the walls or across the counter as they smell the food. Cook fast! We have had pest control people come out three times. They have sprayed and put out traps, and while it has helped some, we still battle them daily. And they win, daily. We have told the kids that the theme song of this house is “The ants go marching.”

Last, but not least, the house is sort of…prison like. While you are enjoying your non-dysentery coffee that you painfully brewed with the wonky outlet while battling the ants, you get to look out the windows that have bars on them to your view of the fence with razor wire on it. Don’t forget to wave good morning to the security guard walking past on patrol! If only all these security measures were able to keep ants out.

And that, my friends, is just a snippet of daily life in our house in Africa. Please continue to pray for us as we continue to work out the bugs (pun intended) and adjust one day at a time!