Day One Hundred & Twenty Three - Lessons of Patience

“Living in Africa has provided me with lessons of patience and free anger management. An hour for coffee. 20 minutes for sugar. Lesson one of the day.” A friend said this today and I could not to anything but agree with this statement.

One needs to learn to sit back and relax in a world where everything around them seems chaotic and disorganized. Your driver says he will be 2 minutes, in reality he will be at least 20 minutes. There is no fast food apart from the local restaurants, and even sometimes you wait there. The rain causes delays. You are faced with situations you would probably never have to deal with in North America. When it rains here, especially in the field, everything stops. People stop moving and you wait for the rain to finish. I love it. I don’t know if I have ever had a meeting that was right on time, or a driver pick me at the time that he was supposed to, or have been in a situation which did not cause some sort of stress.

Day-to-day, I would say that patience is usually found in abundance here. I feel like it would be accurate to compare local way of life here to what life was life back in Canada in the early 1990s. People cook their food over charcoal burners. This takes time. No fast food. You have to take time to prepare your meals. Many people just sit here. Sit in their shops. Sit in their homes. Sit by their boda’s. Sitting passing time. Avoiding /coping with the heat. There is currently no city power at all so wherever there is power it is coming from the compound/restaurant/shops own generator. This means that there is only power at certain times of the day and that the power will go off unexpectedly. Now even before the issue with city power, power is very unpredictable here and will shut off randomly without any warning, leaving you in the dark, maybe in the shower with no power, or in your dark tent and you are forced to search around blindly looking for your flashlight or maybe walking down the street, without a flashlight, and the power goes out leaving you to stumble around the streets back to wherever you were going. Good times I assure you.

Patience is supposed to be about dealing calmly with frustration (there is a lot of that here), accepting others, taking your time (very easy to do here unless you are on a schedule which requires you to be on time), maintaining one’s composure (easier for some), and showing self-control. Life is often about being in waiting mode. You are always waiting for someone or something.

One needs to learn to sit, chill and watch the world go by without feelings of frustration or irritation.

Patience. Patience. Patience.