Running Low

Today, it’s really cold at 70 degrees. A month ago, I’d have added to the eye rolls: “70 degrees isn’t cold! -20 is cold!” But now, I’m shivering in my desk chair and staring at a video of a fireplace that’s playing on Emily’s (my colleague) laptop as if staring at it will make me warm. Even the coffee I made (a luxury I’ve had since I arrived in Comoros, though my supplies are dwindling) is cold now. I sip at it and let the taste fool my tongue for a moment before recognizing this taste associated with warmth is not as it should be. That nothing, really, is as it should be (except, perhaps, culture shock).

 

Every morning, I wake up to the sound of roosters. Even this isn’t as I’ve imagined. My family never owned chickens, though I’ve had plenty of experience with them in the kitchen (deboning a chicken is one of my favorite tasks). I’d bought into the “cock-a-doodle-doo” of the cartoons and children’s books dictated in my childhood: as the sun starts to lighten the day, papa rooster rises from his slumber and shouts a “good morning” to the earth. Let’s end this unnecessary lie –waking up to roosters is like waking up to a forest fire. My first “morning” –it was 4am—I jolted up in bed and crawled out of my mosquito netting toward the window. I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Hundreds of children getting spanked at once? Maybe there really was a fire, and the town was crying in empathy of their neighbor. There wasn’t a stir outside. The sun barely lit the horizon, but I could see enough to know that everything was alright. Then, a few houses away, I saw a rooster on a flat cement roof, peacocking toward the roof’s edge.

 

I groaned, crawled through the mosquito net to my bed, and tucked it under the mattress. As my ears started to ignore the ongoing shrill of roosters and the cinema of my mind started a malaria prophylaxis-inspired dream, a loudspeaker pointed directly at my window began to praise Allah loud enough so he could hear from heaven.

 

I guess I’ve gotten used to the roosters and prayers now. I wake up at 6:30am, begging my alarm for more hours –minutes even. When I manage to pull myself out of bed, slide into semi-dirty clothes, and work up the energy to get water from the cistern to brush my teeth, I’ve worked my brain back into a Comorian normalcy:

 

“Quazi, mama,” I tell my host mother who sits on a plastic lawn chair in a cement kitchen. In the morning, she is always sewing golden thread patterns onto black cloth.

“Mbona. (In Shingadzidja:) Did you wake up?”

I struggle to find the right words: “I woke up. I’m cooking coffee.” Not the best grammar, but she understands my point and nods. And I prepare coffee using the last of my beans from home.