Jarra on 30 liters a day

It's the eve of my departure to the US for forty days, a nice sort of Biblical length of time. While I'm thrilled to be running into family and friends at home, I have to admit that one of the things enticing me the most is the chance to shop for "necessities." I thought I'd get past that in Africa. Assumedly, living among subsistance farmers was going to rid me of materialism. I would be liberated of the need to, well, need stuff that wasn't absolutely necessary. I would return home to the U.S. and scoff at the Target shoppers towing their children along by harnesses and bungee ropes. I'll still probably scoff, but then I'll get in line behind them to buy a kilometer-high pile of new underwear, razors, shoes, hair ties, toothbrushes, deodorant, markers, snacks, drink mixes, AAA batteries, and a dozen other things that my peanut-farming neighbors neither use nor need. It's not to say that my neighbors live only with what is absolutely essential. I've seen people use two months' earnings on a new outfit and hair weave just to appear opulent at a naming ceremony, while there's nothing in the food bowl but oil and a scrap of dried fish. I'll probably never wrap my head around how people here determine their priorities, meanwhile mine haven't changed that much. I've learned to live without running water or power, without the services of washing machines and all the rest of it. But all I really do is cope, compensate by subsituting, jury-rigging, imitating the comforts of home in my own little way, safe in the knowledge that I'll have them again someday. I'll never throw my ipod into the fires of Mordor, if anything I'm holding more tightly to it than ever, because I know I have to beg Mauretanian shop-keepers to charge it for me and pray their generator's irregular current doesn't blow it up. So U.S.A., here I come. Don't cut me in line at the register.