What to Do When There’s Nothing to Do

Post by Lara

30 March 2013

Before we joined Peace Corps we were told that one great skill to have as a volunteer is the ability to keep busy.  We’ve never had trouble with that in the states, so we weren’t terribly worried about how we were going to fill idle time.  Well, we’ve been volunteers for 6 months and in that time we have had copious amounts of time to fill. How do we keep ourselves busy?  Here are a few examples of what we’ve been up to when we’re not teaching, eating, or sleeping.

Editing our Post’s Cook Book

Every Peace Corps country (that we know of) has their own cook book that volunteers bring to site, filled with recipes involving local ingredients, local kitchen/market vocabulary, food prep tips, etc.  Sierra Leone, though, is just starting up Peace Corps again after over ten years hiatus due to the civil war. What that means is that 2 years ago when our post started up again, a volunteer from Guinea did a quick once-over of their cook book and sent it along to us.  There are a few issues with this—first, they speak French in Guinea, so the kitchen and market vocabulary is all in French, which is less than helpful in a country where English and Krio are the defaults.  That language barrier goes beyond vocabulary lists too—many food items are referred to by their brand names and we don’t always have the same brands that are found elsewhere.  Another difference is currency. If a recipe says we should add 50 Guinean Francs worth of spaghetti noodles, we don’t know what the equivalent is in Leones.  For these reasons and also because we love food tu mos [“too much”], we took it upon ourselves to work on updating the book to make it more accessible to Salone Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). 

So far in the interest of updating the cook book, we have tried over 50 recipes, adding our own comments and substitution ideas, spell-checking, and adapting the recipes to more accurately reflect the conditions that PCVs here are cooking in (i.e. offering options other than “place in the refrigerator and chill for 4 hours”—refrigerators are not a common household item for PCVs here, and many of the recipes that seem to require them can be made without one.)  Our hope is to have the shiny, new, updated cook book ready for the next batch of volunteers who swear in next September.

Enchiladas!

Painting

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while you may have seen our washroom makeover.  We completed that project during the first month at site when we didn’t have school and then didn’t have students in school.  Since then, we have painted our parlour floor (it’s still in progress actually) and our kitchen shelves. We are also working on a Peace Corps themed mural that will go on the wall on our back verandah, and we plan to paint several more rooms and a world map on the wall of our parlour before we’re done with 2 years here.  Painting is a great way for us to feel productive by seeing the results of our work, so every month or so we get an itch and go buy the supplies to do another project. We’ll post pictures as we complete projects.

Lara prepping the verandah wall for a mural.

Building Things

We’ve built a whole lot of things in the time we’ve been here—some are still being used, and others fell apart a while ago or ended up being less useful than we expected. Among the things we’ve built (usually with just some sticks from the woods behind our house and/or found materials) are: a dish-drying rack, a hen-house, and a wire whisk.  Soon we will add a new and improved dish rack and hopefully a “tippy-tap” to the list.  [A “tippy-tap” is a mechanical hand-washing station where you can fill a bucket or kettle with water and attach it to a bar of soap by a string, then you can rinse your hands as you’re scrubbing them.]

Uncle Kevin and Musa building our first hen box

Our buddies S.P.Y. and Umz building Hen House #2

 

Marking the Hours

It occurred to us the other day that, being just a few degrees from the equator, we can pretty accurately mark time by watching shadows.  Specifically we started marking the shadow of our tin roof on our pavement. It started out as just something to do and has since progressed to a project that we just might make more permanent—we’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, we have 8:30am to 5:30pm marked off on our pavement, and almost all of the half-hour increments in between (cloudiness prevented a few lines being drawn).  We can’t decide what to call it though, since Kevin insists that a “sundial” needs to be round.  Any creative names will be appreciated!

Seamus and Kevin doing some detail work

The time is now 2:30 PM!

Experimenting in the “Kitchen”

We enjoyed experimenting with new recipes before we got here, but now that we’ve got so much time and so few supermarkets in our town (as in zero), we have made making food (especially condiments) a large part of what occupies us here. Some things we’ve made are: hot sauce, pepper jam, mango chutney, “plum” jam (not the same fruit we eat in the US), teriyaki sauce, pickles, vinegar, and salsa.  Because we don’t have a fridge, a lot of these things we make and eat in the same day or within a few days.  Some things keep surprisingly long on the shelf, especially if they've got a good amount of salt, sugar, or vinegar.  Experimenting keeps us busy with new recipes, and the fact that things spoil more quickly here gives us an excuse to pig-out on things that might go bad if we left them too long, so we’re not complaining!

Kevin making some hot sauce

Reading

Between the two of us we have probably read nearly 50 books since we arrived in Sierra Leone (which is nothing compared to our fellow PCV Anne who we’re pretty sure has singlehandedly passed 100).  For Lara, the amount of reading she does here harkens back to pre-college days when she was able to read for fun more frequently. For Kevin, there has never been a time in his whole life when he’s read this much.  It’s fun in a lot of ways, because Kevin is catching up on books that Lara has told him about for years, like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.  It also comes with the added bonus of improving Kevin’s vocabulary and spelling skills to the point where he no longer hates word games like Scrabble and Bananagrams, which is awesome because now Lara has someone to play with (see below).  Currently Lara is reading The Fellowship of the Ring and Kevin is reading Angels and Demons. 

Playing Games

We really enjoyed playing games in the states, but not usually just the two of us. Some of our favorite games are Settlers of Catan, Euchre, and Ticket to Ride. Unfortunately the board game industry has yet to make a big appearance in Salone (there are two games played here: Ludo, which is kind of like Sorry, and Draughts, which is somewhat checkers-like), so we don’t yet have any board games at our house. We did show up here with playing cards, Uno, and Banangrams, and have had a few other games sent to us in packages.  Lately our two favorite games are Bananagrams and Gin, and we also started playing Cribbage and Scrabble with our friends Dennis and Anne.  Dennis is trying to get us into chess, so depending on how excited we get about it we may just be chess masters by the time our service is over in 2014.

Here we are teaching our friends at AYM to play our homemade game, Pave the Way

Recycling

In the provinces where nearly all the Salone PCVs live, trash collection is not a thing—some of us have introduced waste management programs to our schools and communities which helps a bit, but there is no truck coming around to cart our rubbish away, and so most things either get pitched into the “bush,” or re-used until they fall apart (and then pitched into the bush).  Whether it’s cleaning out a Nutella jar to store some jam or chutney, or hand-washing and then hanging up to dry over 40 Ziplock bags so they could be used again, we do a lot of recycling around here, and often what we don’t re-use our neighbors will gladly take and use for their own purposes (and ultimately pitch into the bush).

We washed and re-used Ziplock bags in the states too, but then we had some luxuries like a sink and liquid dish soap.

Cleaning

Before we were married, Kevin had a conversation with his brother about how it’s important in a relationship for both parties to have similar ideas of what “clean” is.  Kevin told Keith that he wasn’t too worried because he thinks we are pretty compatible in that area, and so far that seems to be true. It’s funny to note that we do differ in some specifics (for instance, Kevin gets very annoyed that Lara lets her car get cluttered, and Lara doesn’t understand why Kevin leaves his clothes on the floor when he changes.) Still, we tend to have just about the same tipping point, where a mess is suddenly too messy to leave alone, and at that point we spring into action.  Our neighbors here like to joke about how we have frequent “general cleaning” days where we stay at home and clean everything that’s been ignored for a while.  Of course, in the words of everyone here, “this is Africa,” and whatever we manage to clean will be made dirty again pretty quickly, whether it’s mud in the rainy season or dust in the dries, so we don’t have to wait too long in between cleaning sprees.

Gardening

Since we got so site in late August, we have planted a coconut tree, basil, 20 papaya trees, 17 pineapples, pumpkins, watermelons, and cucumbers. Of those, the papaya trees, pumpkins, watermelons, and cucumbers seem to have perished due to insects or dry season so we’ll try again as the rains start. The pineapples are looking nice though, and after a tough day it’s nice to go out and hoe some rows to work off some steam. 

Washing Dogs

Since our good friend Brittany went home, we are the only Peace Corps volunteers in our district, and some of the only people who are brave enough to hijack the neighborhood dogs long enough to give them a good scrub and rinse them with some flea-killing Dettol.  Currently there are 6 dogs on our washing rotation, and we’re lucky to have a wash room with a door that we can lure them into and then get the job done.  It’s been a running joke with Brittany that dog-washing is her secondary project here in Salone, and we’re doing our best to carry the torch now!