Sleep Deprivation

Sleep is very important to me. I really enjoy the whole concept of it. Even so, I’m not really good at sleeping. I never ever sleep through the night. I get up out of bed to pee in a cup and dump it out the window so I don’t have to walk across the wet grass full of biting bugs with a lantern to get to the outhouse (judge me—I don’t care. At least I’ll be really good at drug tests for when I become a professional athlete…) or to close the windows and cover up all my electronic items so that they don’t get ruined in the rain that will come inside my windows or to chase a mouse around the room or dump a frog out of my window (he kept knocking over my empty water bottles that I’d tried to fill that day with no luck because we had no sun so our well didn’t work).  Every time I get up or down I have to zip and unzip my stupid tent, which was a great idea from my boss after a mouse ate a hole through my mosquito net and ran across my not-sleeping-at-all-anymore body. Still, tent-sleeping is hotter than mosquito nets and I don’t have a sleeping bag and my sheet won’t stay flat, so it always feels like I’m sleeping on plastic bags when I turn over and over (something else I do—nobody should ever want to sleep me). When I move into my new house (maybe it will happen-they’ve been teasing me about it for months now and it’s still no where ready and the construction guys rarely come to work so I don’t know how it can ever be finished because I don’t know anything about ‘fixtures’ or ‘putting on the doors’ but I assume they involve the physical presence of the construction guys), it will have an indoor bathroom (which is probably what I’m most excited about) and I will return to sleeping in a mosquito net bed and risk the rats—if I can figure out how to take the tent down. I blame my parents for not being camping people—I don’t understand tents unless they are made with blankets and clothespins over the couch and piano bench.

I have no photos of bugs in my bedroom,
but this guy was in my kitchen.

I could blame my poor sleeping ability on why I go to bed early, but really it has nothing to do with sleeping. I go to bed around 9:00pm here, and it is not because I was inspired by my mother’s sleeping habits, but because that is the point when I’ve had it with bugs flying in my face, mouth, hair and crawling up and down my arms. I zip my tent almost all the way, then I stick in the bug spray and kill any lingering mosquitos that might be in there. Does this put me at greater risk of contracting cancer from dangerous bug spray chemicals? Probably. But it’s that or malaria or the misery of a night spent swatting at mosquitos buzzing around my ears. Then I get ready for bed, turning out the light at the last minute (the switch is outside of my room, so I have to be ready to switch on my night-vision, which is not awesome, in order to get back into my room and bed). For the few moments in between me getting into my tent and turning off the light, I become the shiniest white thing in the room and all the bugs head for my glistening skin. It is annoying. Once I am zipped in my tent with the lantern or my phone, I can read or do whatever until I actually feel like sleeping. Angry bugs pelt my tent from the outside, trying to get to the beautiful glowing screen of my phone, but I laugh at them. I do, because I’m petty and I like to gloat, even if it’s just about stupid bugs.

So you can see what a ritual my sleeping/not sleeping is. I don’t like it when my sleep (what little I can get) is interrupted by others, human or animal.  The other night I was awake until 4AM listening to the pounding, thumping-in-your-eyeballs beat of the party across the street (the was after I chased the afore-mentioned frog around my room at midnight, finally catching it and throwing it out the window). I lay in bed hating those people and imagining violent ways to end their hilarious fun. You are probably not just realizing it now, but I am not a nice person by nature.

I lay in bed fantasizing about various ways to make the music stop, but they all involved me getting up and out of the tent and putting on (more) clothes and/or owning an automatic weapon, so I never got around to doing any of them. This was after I tried using the Power of my Mind, naturally, but it seems that my Mind Powers were blocked by the thumping beat—my own personal kryptonite. I ended up trying to soothe my anger by venting on Facebook so that people would feel sorry for me and my sad sleepless night. It helped only a little bit. A short in the party-people’s generator would have helped me more.

And now (that ‘now’ only applies if the internet is good enough today for me to post on the blog), there is a praise team from Juba staying behind my house. They sing loud passionate hymns accompanied by drums and gourd-shakers until midnight. They’re supposed to leave in a few days, but I am resigning myself to being sleep-deprived and cranky for the next few days. I prayed that God would send a thunderstorm and rain them out (we had evening thunderstorms every night last week except for the 4am party night), but He’s probably enjoying the enthusiastic praise and less worried about a grumpy foreign girl who is wanting rain purely for the purpose of ruining other people’s fun. I already told you, I am not a nice person.

~~~Here is where I tried to post of video, showing how loud church is here, but it wouldn't work.~~~

Sorry.

My sleep issues don’t make me a morning person, even if I am in bed so early. It’s not that I mind getting up (well, sometimes I do), but I don’t want to talk to anyone. I wake up perfectly content in my solitude, and I don’t want to see anyone else. If you talk to me before I go for a run or do some other type of physical activity (running is best, though), I will hate you. I hate everybody in the morning. I should always be isolated until I kick my endorphins into gear. Yes running does give me black toenails and plantar fasciitis, but when I get back from running 5 or 6 miles, I find that I don’t hate the world after all, and actually people are friends not enemies.  Then I can get on with my morning beauty routine, South Sudan style.

Hanging out with people in a friendly way--
Jona and Oguna think I'm cool and are imitating how I sit.
ok--I don't really have any photos that go with this post...

When I lived in Khartoum, I could get ready at a leisurely pace, choosing clothes and jewelry and scarf and shoes that will be most easily kicked off while sitting at my desk in the office.  At some point I'd take my tinted moisturizer/sunscreen (IT DOES COUNT AS MAKEUP, I AM A GROWN UP!) out of the mini fridge in my room where I left it so that it wouldn't melt all over my sink when I was gone and had turned off the slightly functioning AC.  This way I could show up at the office looking presentable. But in Mundri, my beauty routine is:

•   Maybe take a shower if it was hot last night and the shower water might be warmish.

•   Put on some clothes that don’t smell horrible and only have minimal dirt and mango stains.

•   Apply sunscreen.

•   Again, please remember to apply sunscreen, you stupid white girl who burned the skin off your back while “working” in your “garden.”

•   Attach a new bandaid or two or ten.

•   Get on the motorcycle and let your hair dry in the wind… (though you will regret this later when trying to comb out the tangles)

And now I'll stop complaining/bragging about my life (how many of YOU get to wear mango-stained clothes to work?), and end by updating you on the fact that I didn't get to post this blog earlier, so I can let you know that I decided to just join in. So I brought my shaker and my chair, hopped over the fence and jumped in. Do I know any of the songs? No, but it doesn't matter because I can participate by shaking my shaker. The ladies were really impressed by my shaking skills, and when they told me how good I was, they said it with an air of astonishment. I think maybe they'd heard that stereotype about white people not having any rhythm. But after years of music lessons from Jennie Stillman and having a drummer for a dad, I shake on tempo. But I can't dance and shake at the same time, like everyone else, so I'm not really that impressive...

I don't know if this picture is going to load fully or not, but if it does you're going to think that A) I have never seen a motorcycle before, but then you will realize that can't be right so you will suspect that B) motorcycles in South Sudan are extra-long like a sausage with wheels on either end, but in fact, C) I have really bad hand-eye coordination, as I mentioned in the last post. Also, D) yes, that is a large monkey sitting like a prairie dog by the side of the road and E) that is an accurate depiction of my hair after I use the "dry by air from the motorcycle" method. Repent's hair is very short, and so it doesn't show up in this photo because I am very careful about things like perspective, since my drummer father is also an artist.