I said good bye to my accommodation Monday morning, went to work with all my stuff and moved in to the new accommodation in the evening. I had had a look round previously and thought it looked nice – little buildings with bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms in them all set in a garden, and only a short walk to work.
The accommodation lady who showed me around had very kindly given me a room with its own bathroom, so I could ‘do my cosmetics’. I was happy to start with… things started to go slightly down hill an hour later when I couldn’t find the kitchen. When I eventually tracked it down all the lights were off and it was locked. I found the accommodation lady and the conversation went as follows:
Me: the kitchen is locked, please can you unlock it?
Lady: tomorrow. You can wait.
Me: I need to eat! I need to use it tonight!
Lady: (resignedly) Ok, I will come.
30 minutes later, no response and kitchen still locked.
Me: the kitchen is still locked. Please can you open it?
Lady: can you wait till tomorrow?
Me: NO! I need to eat!
Lady: come with me (I get taken to a different kitchen)
Me: ok, now where can I put my food?
(Lots of misunderstandings and language barriers followed before I eventually managed to get a cupboard).
Lady: what time are you going to eat tomorrow?
Me: I don’t know! Whenever I like! And I would like to use the kitchen for breakfast too please?
Lady: ok then.
Did my cooking, then transported my food 100m in the dark to my room and sat down to eat it. Then realised the bedroom was full of mosquitoes (Addis has very few mosquitoes as we are at 2400m altitude). More mosquitoes than I had seen in the last 5 weeks, to be precise, all flying around my bedroom! And the 15 spiders who had set up a home in all corners of the room were doing a rubbish job at catching them!
Later in the evening the lady from before came around with a kitchen key for me so I could use it whenever I liked. Phew!
She then came around again as she had locked herself out of her own kitchen…
Had a terrible nights’ sleep due to the extremely loud mosquitoes dive bombing me all night. I’ve never heard such a loud whine! And they were out of tune with each other. All this was after killing 10 mosquitoes with my book before going to bed. Sorry Linda Grant, who wrote the dark circle, the book you wrote is covered with mosquito insides and blood (probably mine 😞). I also discovered that no one had cleaned the bathroom, as there were skid marks in the toilet and the stuff on the wall that I had initially put down to a bad paint job was actually muck.
At work everyone was asking how was my new accommodation, so I told them. They were very sweet and concerned, and said I should talk to one of the doctors who would ‘sort it out’.
The next night was a night of more mosquito killing, spider dodging and for the first time, cockroach dodging in the kitchen. There were also tons of flies everywhere. And my next door neighbours were very loud! Lots of raucous laughter. Think I will not be staying here long!
The following two nights had the same set up, and I gave up on Thursday and decided to go back to my old accommodation. Whilst it is a taxi journey to work and a little more expensive (though not as much as I thought as the awful place is charging me extra to use the kitchen – the cheek!) it is clean, the staff are kind and helpful, there are minimal insects and I do not have to walk past girls pouring the family’s stools into the open sewer at 8am. 10 years of nursing has given me a strong stomach, but even so, I’d rather not witness that if I don’t have to.
I think one of the issues was that the area surrounding the new accommodation was very poor. A lot of the people living there are patients of the hospital. It’s a bit grim to think that that is their normal, or even better than normal – quite a lot of them don’t want to go back to the area they came from. Rather makes me feel like a picky foreigner!
Having said that, it was still wonderful to go back to my previous accommodation – clean, minimal biting insects and a kitchen with no strings attached!
All the staff found it very entertaining that I was back after such a short time, but they welcomed me with open arms! It was such a relief to be back – they even gave me my own room back!
Anna’s adventures 