Snakes or fluffy towels

Rainy season at a refugee camp: tents flood, the mud is up to your knees, your clothes don't dry, snakes like to stay warm in your tent, textbooks in schools get wet and children are coughing and sneezing and can't hear what the teacher says because the rain is pouring so loud on the roof. And yet the kids keep laughing and make fun of these two white girls who try to entertain them teaching them songs in strange languages and do little dances and clapping games with them as there is nothing else to do and nowhere to go.

No high-level cluster meeting, no coordination meeting or joint fundraising proposal to write, but just being stuck in a classroom for hours as the rain just would not stop. At the end of the day I got into the white car, drove to my hotel full of dry, fluffy towels and felt awful and strengthened at the same time. And ashamed. My government is cutting funds that should be going to these children. Hand clapping games and silly Dutch songs will not get them anywhere in life and they deserve better. For crying out loud.

Shorts from Makola

Makola market is a city on its own. You can buy everything you could possibly think of (ok, maybe not an iPad or real Louis Vuitton bag, but anything else, from Chinese Christmas decorations to pink toilet paper with My Little Pony on it to cute woolly puppies you want to take home and cuddle). It’s a mess of tiny, dodgy streets, overcrowded multi storey buildings and shady businesses. People die here under the stairwell and babies get born in dark little sheds in the maze. It smells like warm garbage and open gutter and you can get a haircut everywhere on the street or be blessed by a voodoo priest at the same corner. So, yes, always a nice Saturday morning activity to go there.

In one of the container shops I tried on two pairs of shorts. Trying on clothes here is always a recipe for disaster. More often than not you won’t even be able to put it on, as your skin is too sticky and sweaty and the dress gets stuck around your head, zippers don't move and you think you are going to faint behind that see-through sheet that is actually defining the fitting room but is really the sheet that covers the toilet. But anyway, I managed to try on two pairs of shorts.

‘Which one should I take’ I sort of mumbled out loud while looking at both of them. The girls in the shop didn’t hesitate. ‘The blue one makes your booty look waaaaay bigger’. For a moment I was confused. But then again I realised I have had this happen before and how much I love this country. ‘But is that good or bad’, I asked, just to be sure. ‘Madam, of course that’s good. Take the blue one, men like big booties not small small booties’. And so I did. Leaving behind my gym membership card, and secretly sticking out my bottom a bit more while bringing back my shoulders.