La Vie à la Cellule Monastique

Macredi...
The first night at the Cellule Monastique was pretty pleasant actually, once you take away the lack of ventilation in our room making it a concrete sweatbox meant to house one person, but currently having two.
The morning was thouroughly more interesting than the night! First, I figured that doing laundry would be greatly in my best interest for making new friends of the monks and for personal cleanliness. I would probably have changed my thinking drastically once I realized that laundry consisted of 1 tub full of soapy water, 1 tub full of not so soapy water, 1 tub full of “clean” water, and a clothesline. I’ll let you fill in the details, just add about 2½ hours to them.
After marveling at how much work I had just done to wash my very limited clothing selection, (3 plain colored shirts, a pair of pants, 3 pairs of boxers, 3 pairs of socks, a pair of shorts, my soccer shorts/shirt, and my towel – that’s 54 clothing combinations not including the soccer stuff or towel, and I don’t care if you can’t tell if I am wearing the same thing as the day before because there is a definite difference!) I helped prepare lunch. I wanted to pick up some cooking skills and see how things were made so that I could diversify my oven pizza/ pasta/ and egg sandwich cooking skills. Turns out I was only looked at as a workhorse for them, I chopped garlic and peeled carrots for an hour on a little wooden stool while using an old rusty knife. I guess the master chef dream is going to have to wait.
Lunch came and went as fast as any of the other meals, and before we knew it Colin and I were at Kassim’s house where we played some Crazy Americans and attempted to teach Texas Hold’em to the kids of age there. FAIL. They can stick to their primmative ways of shuffling cards (the poker style is completely revolutionary for them) and Crazy Americans. Oh and I bought a tailored outfit in the market earlier that week and Kassim picked it up from the tailor for me so I tried that on. It looked sweet, but I looked about as out of place as a Penguin in Hawaii in it! Also, while I was at the house, I took out my camera and took a ton of pictures of Kassim’s little siblings and other relatives. I would say that some of the pictures are the best ones that I have ever taken.
We ended up getting so caught up in everything at the house that we were late to mass back at the Cellule. Oops. Better to be late and noticed than to not be noticed at all. I’ll argue that one with some of you, and you know who you are, later. After mass came dinner, which I also helped to prepare in my very menial and chore-like fashion. There I happened to have the opportunity to meet a candidate of the Agbang Monastery named Pierre-Paul, who is a couple of years older than Colin and I. But it was nice to have someone who was a little more, how would you say it, like us around to talk to. We chatted for a while and then returned to the concrete inferno to blog before going to bed.