I guess, I never realized that one of the blessings of where I live is that you never have any ads in your mail box. Well. Hardly ever. Because there are those rare occasions in which you actually find a student or organization kindly offering their services and generously placing some info paper in your mail box. But as I said: those occasions are rare. Unless you count the services offered by the kids of our dear foreign faculty colleagues. Ever since I first got here, a few of them have advertised their services by placing posters around the foreign faculty residences, offering to take out your trash, water your plants, do your shopping, dust your home, and clean your floors, etc. Until recently. A short while ago, they got smarter. Now they don’t limit their advertising to posters, now they’ve found that a new method may actually be more effective. And so recently, I keep finding little notices sticking on the door to my apartment, notices that you can’t just ignore. I guess, someone …

The routine goes as follows: you find something is broken in your home. You inform the front desk, who in turn informs the workers. You give a time frame for when it’s convenient for you to have the workers come. You wait. And when everything goes properly, the workers will show up eventually (though most likely not at the time you specified, or the time you’re waiting for them), and the problems get solved. That’s when you’re lucky. But then, things always change. These days, I find things rather reversed. These days, it’s the front desk calling me on my way to breakfast (it’s 7 am in the morning). They tell me, “You’ve got a problem in your home.” “I do?” I say. “Yes. A Leak.” “Nothing’s wet in my apartment. Though I had a leak a couple weeks ago.” “Yes, but the office underneath your apartment has water coming down the walls.” “Oh. I see.” “So, can we send in a worker to fix this problem?” “Sure,” I say, and quickly tell them that …

You may remember the issues we’re having with the lights. (I talked about it some time last year.) Well, that same issue continues. And you know that there’s an issue the moment you step into our hallway. Why? Because at times you have to feel your way to our doors. Because the light bulbs love to quit their jobs just as frequently as is the case with the light bulbs we have in our apartments. These days, we’re still lucky, though. Because – as you can see – there’s still enough light to give you at least an idea of where you’re going. As that’s not always the case, I consider myself lucky these days.

Shoes are nasty affairs around here. Everyone knows that. It’s because the streets are pretty nasty since grown men love to spit and little children love to use them, the streets that is, as bathroom. It is for this very reason that I’ve instated a rule for any visitors of mine, and for myself: the no-shoe-policy. A sign at my door promptly informs everyone endeavoring to enter my domain to please take off their shoes. And of course, I keep a bunch of my own shoes strewn right across my entrance so as to make people not miss the point. And yet, it fascinates me, how people still manage to be totally oblivious toward the fact that while persons are welcome to my home, their shoes certainly aren’t, because as much as I wonder how that happens, there are still plenty of times when I discover a pair of shoes that made it from the streets straight into my home.

When your eyes start hurting and feel irritated, then you know something is wrong. And of course, when you hear the wind rattling around the corner of the house, you really know something’s wrong. And then, when you look out of the window, and you see how the sky has turned yellowish and everything is wrapped in a thick cloud of dust, that’s when you know: it’s a sand storm. And trust me, sand storms are no nice things. You know why when you see the layer of dust slowly descending onto every surface in your home, and when everything you touch feels a bit more slippery than usual, because it’s covered in tiny fine little grains of dust.