An Uphill Battle

So too many of you reading this know me well enough that I cannot pretend that I am a neat person. Anyone who came into my apartment last year may be surprised to find that there was indeed a couch in my room, not just a huge pile of clothes. Clutter does not faze me and mess is just a normal part of my life. So if I am saying this, you know it has to be bad. My house here gets so filthy that I feel the need to sweep it everyday. It has not rained here for months so all the roads are loose dirt and at night the wind gets strong enough to blow it through my windows and under my door and I wake up every day to a coating of dirt on everything. Guinea does not have a waste management system. In the town, there are deep gutter to collect trash and water, but out in my quartier we have nothing. An average of 5 plastic bags a night find some way to blow under the ¾ inch gap in my door. Then there is my roof. The underside is thatched. Creatures have taken up residence in between the thatched part and the tin part and when they run around, bits of ceiling rain down upon me. Today I have chased a lizard and a mouse in my house and right now I have a cricket chirping away stuck in my roof. Last, but not least, are the ants. My floor is some sort of clay tiling laid just on top of God's good green (really brown) earth. Ants can burrow up through the earth, through my tile and create ant hills inside my house or these weird dirt tubing things up the side of my wall. I discovered two new huge ant hills today with about a cup of dirt each- one behind my trunk and one under a piece of cardboard I was using as a mat. So whether its coming from above, below, or all around the earth tried to reclaim my home on a daily basis. I just finished a book called “The World Without Us” that examines how quickly the earth would return to its pre-human state if we were all to disappear. I can say, in a week the Guinea zoo will have moved in and within a month it would be filled up with dirt. I give it 6 months until it was like I was never here. In the battle between dirt and Meghan, dirt is definitely winning.