Comfort: Luxury or Necessity?

The bus from Dar es Salaam dropped us off at Riverside Campsite on Saturday.  Riverside is the setting for our four months of language study; various Tanzanian teachers come to the camp from town (Iringa) each day.  They work with us in nice small groups, according to when we come and how much we already know.  I’ve had two days of classes, and I can see the value of choosing this language “school.”

However...

This is a camp.  It’s a very nice camp, but I’m not the outdoors-type, and I keep wrestling with various aspects of living here.  The first two nights I stayed in one of the tented bandas:

There’s plenty of room inside, with two single beds, a desk, and storage area.  It’s just different.  My first night I kept telling myself, “It’s going to be fine.”  “You’ll get used to it.”  “It won’t be as bad as you think.”  “If other people can do it, so can I.”  All this to drown out the pitiful voice asking for attention: “But I don’t like this...”  In the morning I felt much more optimistic.  I hadn’t had (or noticed?) any 6 or 8-legged visitors crawling over me, and I was learning how to make life work.

That is not to say I didn’t jump at the chance to move into one of the stone bandas:

The camp directors offered our group’s two single girls (Shona and me) the choice to share this two room structure instead of having our own tents.  As soon as we saw the attached bathroom Shona said, “Sold!”, echoing my thoughts exactly.  No more walking down the hill to the toilet/shower block!  And this toilet even flushes (usually).  We moved in Monday.

I was especially glad for the move after a last sleepless night in my tent.  This time I woke up to rustling against my tent.  All my senses alert, I scanned the tent with a borrowed flashlight.  Finally I saw a long tail vanish into the opposite bed.  That was enough for me; I spent the rest of the night in Shona’s tent... where I lay awake listening to something inside (or trying to get inside).  By the way, in case you’re wondering, my visitor was not a rat as I had guessed, but a mouse.  Except this mouse’s body alone was 6 inches long.  I saw it when I moved the pillow on that bed the next day and it dashed out... and through the holes it had chewed in the heavy-duty tent during the night.

All this to say, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the idea of comfort.  To rough it just for the sake of roughing it has no appeal to me.  I’ve learned that it’s not wrong to take measures to better set yourself up for success.  How then should I view this situation?  There aren’t many options open to me (other than flat-out quitting).  

What is most intimidating is that this is not a weekend trip, or even a week’s excursion.  I will live here, truly live here, for FOUR MONTHS.  Four months of living out of suitcases--due to bugs and security, I zip everything up each day and night.  I would love to unpack and feel a little more settled.  Four months of my sleep being disturbed by noises, visiting creatures, a hard bed...  Maybe I’ll get to where I can sleep through the night; it is still early yet.  Meanwhile, the reason I’m here is to study Swahili, and I can’t help wishing I could deal with the mental strain of a new language without the added stress of camp survival.

So I haven’t figured out any answers yet.  Except to say that everything seems worse at night, and each morning brings a new day.  The scenery is beautiful (I’ll post pictures soon), and I am indeed learning Swahili.  I think those reassurances I gave myself the first night were right on target.  I will get used to camp life.  Hey, last night was our first in the stone banda, and we heard mice... and I decided I wanted to sleep this time.  

So I did.