July is the hump-month

Without going through the arduous task of actually counting days, around now marks around the half way point of my (anticipated) time in East Africa.  Soon, it will also mark the longest that I've been or lived away from home.  Miraculously, I continue to make amateur mistakes with troubling frequency.  

For example:

Letting my gas run low

I've been warned 'always have gas, because sometimes there isn't any'.  This is the type of advice that you can listen to but not internalize if you have never been to a gas station that was open, but not selling gas.  A few weeks ago, as I pulled into the station near my house a guy started frantically waving his arms in a gesture that clearly meant "there's nothing here".  Of course as I write this my gas tank is again almost empty, tempting fate to leave me to learn the hard way.

Assuming that if I don't get cash, I wont get charged 

False.  And alarming given the frequency with which I request money and the machine pauses, makes the money counting sound and then spits out only my bank card.  This also happened a few weeks ago and it took almost a week for the charge to make its way off my bank statement. I still haven't checked my account after it happened last Tuesday.  That said, since the turn around is about a week maybe I'm just in time....

Planning on ordering lunch at work

Convinced that the work lunch diet of rice and beans was doing nothing for my figure, I decided to start bringing my own.  Occasionally, though, I slip and think to myself "at least I can just order today".  Not exactly false.  Its more a matter of what time one considers to be lunch.  When I first arrived, the catering service came at one.  For reasons I am still unclear about, that company fell out of favour and for the last several months we have been trying new people.  The concept of a lunch service providing lunch seems a bit lost on most of these proprieters. A lucky day is one when lunch arrives before two.  Yesterday, they called at two to say it wasn't coming at all.  Fortunately yesterday I brought a lunch, but really its only a matter of time....

Washing my hands 

Eww, gross, I know! My kidneys are thanking me for drinking several litres of water these days, however there are consequences.  I work in a satellite office where we are lucky enough to have our own facilities.  Unfortunately, we haven't had water from the public utility for over a month.  This means that every day a truck comes and fills a tank with water.  Because they usually come in the afternoon, your last memory of the day is having water, so by 10 am the next morning when you press 'flush' you experience a number of emotions: embarrassment, upset and frustration -- you should know better! Compounding this is when reflexively you put soap in your hands only to be confronted again with the same problem! I've at least been lucky enough to have a glass of water on my desk for such emergencies!

That said, I have managed to learn some things too.  If I see a non-perishable food that I like, I know that I should buy as much of it as I can.  I know that the person driving behind me is likely to try to pass me or be in my blind spot conducting some maneuver designed to get them god knows where as fast as possible.  I've internalized a lesson from a friend who has been here a long time: plan to do a whole bunch of things when you leave the house, so you can feel happy when one or two get done.  What I'm now going to focus on is trying to enjoy and experience as much of Tanzania as I can.  There's a long way still to go, but if time moves at the same pace it has since January, I'll be out of here before I know it!