Summer thievery

Ah, summer. That time of year in Africa when the heat drags you out of bed at 8am (why did you sleep in so late anyway, you lazyass? Oh, probably because you got up to turn on and off the fan about five times throughout the night, waking up alternately sweating and shivering), makes you want to lay down on the cool cement floor in the afternoon despite the sand and the ants, leads you to take multiple cold baths a day, brings overripe mangoes crashing down onto your tin roof with a gunshot bang Ah, summer. Only a few more sweaty months to go.

This morning, I cracked open my morning egg only to have something solid plop into the skillet. It was white and I didn't look at it too closely because it would have discouraged me from still eating the egg. (Why waste a perfectly good egg?) I scooped out the fetus with a spoon and deposited it into my dog's food bowl, and went right back to making my scrambled eggs. (By the way, I should add that while I was cracking the egg over the pan, the pan was not sitting on my stove. It was on my kitchen counter because I've learned that otherwise, I'll get a nasty electric shock from my stove. Apparently, eggs conduct electricity. Every time I touch a pan on my stove, it's with wooden chopsticks or a thick cloth. So ghetto.)

After my eggs and coffee, I decided to cut open a big green mango that had been sitting in my kitchen for a few days. It was a beautiful golden yellow inside, except for a little part near the top that was bruised and a little brown. Whatever. It was sweet and delicious. (The maggots squirming their way out of the brown portion seemed to think so too.) I cut around them and finished the rest of the mango, despite the fact that the small holes here and there hinted that my little wormy friends didn't only reside in the brown part....

No big deal. I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, right? Just as I was sitting down to write this blog, I happened to notice to the left of my bed, the wall was entirely covered with ants. Covered. With. Ants. Grabbed my can of Baygon and went to town, waited til the plink plink plink of ants raining down stopped, and then swept out the pile of ant corpses. I don't find these things horrifying as I do irritating. "Seriously?" I said to the maggoty mango. "You've got to be kidding me," I told the mass ants.

Okay, so things like that don't bother me anymore. What does get me worked up is when I let neighborhood kids color at my front door, and they repay me by reaching in my windows and stealing stuff from inside my house. Yeah.

Earlier this week, I happened to notice that one of my "artwork displays" in the window was missing, a painting that I did of an American flag and a Mozambican flag. I asked all the children, who I have recently been making tissue paper window star and rosettes with, and narrowed it down to two suspects, two neighbor boys I was already not a fan of. These are two 6 year old boys who can barely speak Portuguese, come at 6am to ask to color even when my front door is still closed, and call my name through every window in the house when I don't answer. They climb up my mango tree to take the big mangoes that aren't even ripe, and when I yell at them to stop, they wait until I go back inside my house and try to sneak up the tree again.

So I'm not surprised everyone is saying they took my drawing. In fact, when I ask them, each of them blames the other. I tell them that until I get my drawing back, they aren't welcome to come color at my house. The next day, they're waiting outside my house when I come home. I'm on the phone but it doesn't stop them from interrupting my conversation to say, "Mana Vivienne, estamos a pedir pintar." We're asking to color.
Are you serious? I snap at them that they can't color until they return my drawing. In faulty Portuguese, they tell me that their friend already tore it up. So... they stole my drawing and then ripped it up. That makes a lot of sense. Then they ask to color again. I slam the door in their faces.

When I go talk to the moms, of course, they don't really do anything. "It's just a drawing?" They say, and I can tell they're baffled that I'm so upset. But I'm not really mad over the fact that their kids took a piece of paper, I'm mad that these brats that I let hang out at my house are taking things – anything- of mine without permission. "Okay, we'll talk to them about it" they say unconvincingly, making me feel like a jerk. "Oh, kids will be kids," they sigh, as if thievery is inevitably ingrained in every child. I'm super frustrated.

I get a knock on my door a little bit later, and it's the sister of one of the boys with two pieces of blank white paper in her hands. "I'd like to apologize on my behalf of my brother," she says, holding out the paper. The kid won't even come apologize himself. I tell her to take the paper home, it's not about the paper, I have plenty of paper in my house.

I can ignore chicken babies that fall out of my eggs. I can eat mangoes full of maggots. I can destroy an army of ants. But I can't discipline someone else's kids. (I'm pretty sure my puppy has better manners.) When it comes to that, I can't do a single damn thing.. except withhold the coloring supplies.