by Stephanie Wu
Every morning, I was woken up at four thirty A.M. by my floormates’ shower ritual. Everyone had her own kettle to boil water in, because there was no hot water in the dorm. In order to avoid a cold shower, the girls made multiple trips—while wearing nothing but a shower cap—from the bathroom and back to heat up enough water for a small bathtub’s worth of water. Everyone made fun of me for refusing to take off my towel. Throughout the process, you could hear music blasting from the rooms—a mixture of American pop music from nine months ago—that’s how long it took for music to get to Botswana—and Setswanan gospel music.
After the multiple trips to get water, Keletso stood in the middle of our room, which had linoleum tile floors, and started scooping cups of water over her body to take a bath. And she always worried about me getting sick because I took cold showers. I’d rather shiver in the freezing cold than go through all that for a hot shower every morning. I did try it once, because I wanted a hot shower and I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But it was too much work for one shower.
There were bathrooms on each floor of the dorm, with two showers, two sinks, and two toilets, but they were always packed. It was all about the hierarchy—only the two oldest girls on each floor were able to use the showers. There was none of that whole “I have class, do you mind if I dash in before you?” thing. The eldest girls took as long as they wanted and no one questioned them. And there was no running water, so if you wanted to use the toilet, you had to go outside and bring in water to pour down the toilet to get it to work.
It all brought up this bigger question of water in Botswana, which Keletso taught me about. Pula is the Setswanan word for currency, blood, and water, and it’s the word they shout in celebrations. They never waste water there. One of the best moments I had with her was when we were sitting in the dorm one very hot night. I’d been there for almost three months, and it hadn’t rained at all. All of a sudden, you could smell a difference in the air, like rain was coming. Keletso sat up and said, “Come with me.” As we were running downstairs, it started to rain, and everyone in the surrounding dorms sprinted outside and was all chanting “pula” and doing this cool dance. “Do you get it now?” said Keletso. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly get it, but I understood where she was coming from after that. Living in a permanent drought culture will make you appreciate water and showers.
Every two weeks, Keletso got these elaborate weaves and hairstyles done. But before she could go to the salon, she had to take the existing braids out first. She always sat on my bed with a brush and waited for me to stop whatever I was doing to help her unbraid the hundreds of braids in her head. It took about three hours, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea of the amount of work that goes into an African’s hair. Most of the girls did it together, and we joked that you always knew when it was Sunday hair day by looking out the window. There were always tumbleweeds of discarded fake black hair after everybody spent the whole day taking it out. These three hours of unbraiding hair were the only time we truly talked. Keletso was so quiet most of the time that it was hard to get her to open up. She was a quiet person, and anything she said was usually to help me understand what I thought of as the absurd parts of life there.
For instance, in Botswana, there are these locustlike giant flying ants, almost like cicadas, which come out every seven years. No one told us to expect this at all, and one day, we heard a low hum, and a black cloud came toward us. All of a sudden, we saw an enormous swarm of flying ants. It was so bizarre, it felt like we were in an apocalypse. I didn’t know what to do, what they were, or whether they would sting. We study-abroad kids were screaming and running to our rooms—it felt like a blizzard of bugs. I got to my room and started slamming the doors shut, stuffing towels in the cracks and closing windows. Meanwhile, Keletso was as calm as can be. She walked around the room with a little basket, picking the bugs up and tearing off their wings, popping a few into her mouth live and putting others in a basket to eat later. It was my worst nightmare, and she was telling me how tasty the bugs were. She thought I was absolutely insane not to want to eat them. For her, food was literally falling from the sky.
When we finally left the room, the door was sticking because there was actually a mound of bugs against the other side. Sweepers had to come in and go through the hallways to clear a path. The bugs lasted for twenty-four hours and then suddenly died. I did try one eventually, after they fried it and I knew it was thoroughly dead. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be—I pretended it was a Cheeto. I’m an adventurous eater, but I had to pass on the living bugs.
Later in the semester, when my homestay fell through for a variety of reasons, Keletso told me to stay with her family. She had lots of younger siblings, and her family was incredibly generous and hospitable. Since my family’s Italian, I wanted to cook a traditional Italian meal for them to thank them for hosting me. I got all the ingredients for spaghetti and meatballs, and it took me hours to make a huge pot of it because the power kept going out. We all sat down for dinner; they’d never had pasta before—they kept calling it macaroni, since they were familiar with Kraft macaroni and cheese packets. I was nervous about them liking the food. I gave them huge portions, and they all sat there, quietly eating. All of a sudden, the youngest brother started to cry. He didn’t speak any English, so he said something in Setswana to his mom, and she started laughing. It turned out he wasn’t crying because he didn’t like it but because he wanted to eat it all and didn’t have any more room in his stomach. “It’s okay,” his mom said. “We have a solution.” And they all stood up from the table after having eaten this heavy pasta meal and, with totally straight faces, put their hands in the air and started jogging through the house to settle the food. After ten minutes of this running around with their hands in the air, roller-coaster-style, they sat back down and ate another full portion of the pasta. I had made enough for at least twelve people, and the five of us finished it all. I guess it was a huge compliment. At the end of the homestay, they asked me to take a photo with them. It started with the immediate family, but then they said, “Wait, we need to get our goat in the picture.” Then the neighbors also wanted a photo, and extended family came by to drop things off and also wanted one. The next thing I knew, it was a two-and-a-half-hour process. The majority of them had never met an American before and thought it was a novelty.
I loved living with Keletso. She’s a phenomenal runner and hopefully will represent Botswana in the Olympics someday. Living in Botswana was an incredibly life-changing experience. Every single thing you take for granted in your life, from amenities to ways of communicating, was so fundamentally different. I wouldn’t have been able to process what I was going through without her quiet guidance.
—R, 25 (F)
THE MANIC-DEPRESSIVE
WHEN I MOVED TO FRANCE for my postdoctoral program, I didn’t know anyone else who was going to be there. I met Brad through a friend, who told me that he was another American who was going to be at the same institute as me. The two of us exchanged a few brief e-mails and agreed to split a place to save money. It sounded better to have a friend of a friend than nobody at all. I got there four or five weeks before he did and did a lot of the legwork of finding an apartment for us.
We got along fine when we met. I could tell Brad had been through a few weird things in life. He’d taken a year off from grad school and had basically gotten stoned the entire time—he was a wacky guy and crazy things happened to him one way or another. In our first few weeks living together, I noticed that he constantly got stoned or drunk, went on shopping binges, or spent days watching television. It was as if he had poor impulse control. He was thirty-two, but was still immature and had a lot to figure out.
Then in the spring, Brad told me he was taking himself off his depression medication, because he felt fine. I didn’t even know that he was taking anything, but assumed he was dealing with it in a somewhat responsible manner. A couple of weeks went by, and that’s when things bega
n to get really frustrating.
Brad started staying up later and later, drinking more heavily, and stopped caring about his job or being healthy. By June, he was staying out at the bars until two A.M. on weeknights and inviting a dozen strangers over to play music in our living room at three in the morning. This happened several nights in a row, until I sat him down and said, “I’m not trying to cut into your social life, but I live here.” He always apologized and said he’d be better in the future, or offered to make me dinner to make up for it. But the cycle kept happening over and over again.
One afternoon I came home and discovered that he’d gone on an afternoon shopping spree and purchased two guitars and motorcycle clothing. His on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lisa, was concerned that he was buying much more than normal. She had sat him down to try to get him help because he was off his meds, but he refused. An older friend of Brad’s, Gary, who’s in his early fifties but has lived a rock-and-roll lifestyle, called to ask how Brad was doing. “Keep an eye on him,” he said. “I’m concerned about him.”
Brad had also started hanging out with the homeless guys in the neighborhood, who he met at the shelter a block or so away. He bummed around with them in the afternoons and evenings and bought them a couple of beers. He wasn’t an extrovert, let alone someone who cared about the plight of the homeless. But he found them interesting, and stood around and chatted with them. He was surprised that once he started hanging out with homeless people, others thought he was homeless as well.
One evening, I got home late after dinner with friends to find that our apartment was completely filled with junk Brad had purchased from a secondhand store in the neighborhood—everything from ironing boards to an electric lawnmower to tool sets and clothes. It was easily a thousand euros of crap. That’s when it hit me how bad it was. I saw him on the balcony drinking beers with a homeless guy, and he asked if I wanted to meet his friend, a known crack addict. Instead, I went upstairs, grabbed my laptop, passport, a few changes of clothing, and called Lisa, who by then was his ex. “Things have gotten bad,” I said. “Come over now.” We called emergency mental health services, but they told us that they couldn’t help him unless he was in imminent danger to himself or others or volunteered to be committed.
We agreed that we’d try to talk to Brad together, but when we got home, he wasn’t there. We searched the town to try to find him and stage some type of three A.M. intervention. When we next saw him days later, I told him we had to talk. “Everything’s fine,” he said. “I’m a little depressed but trying to feel better.” He didn’t realize how bad it’d gotten for the rest of us. He agreed to move out, and his dad happened to be coming into town the next day.
When his dad arrived, he knew there was a crisis going on—he had seen all the symptoms of an oncoming manic phase from eight thousand miles away. It was nine in the morning and Brad was chugging a bottle of gin while chain-smoking and pounding cups of coffee. He made his dad take him to a prostitute. He had a ton of sexual energy and needed to blow off steam somehow. He even proposed that the two of us get a prostitute housekeeper to straighten up so we didn’t have to do too much cleaning, and that we could share her. That was without a doubt one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard come out of another person’s mouth.
His dad told me that Brad had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder awhile back, and that it ran in the family. He clearly needed to be back on his meds as soon as possible, and in the meantime, they were hoping he would wear himself out. I left town for the weekend, because I needed to walk away.
When I got back, Brad had invited one of the crack addicts to stay in our living room. “I hope that’s okay with you,” he said, though it absolutely wasn’t. By the end of that week, Gary and Brad’s father managed to sit him down and tell him he needed help. They got him to go to the emergency room, where he got medication and finally managed to get himself to sleep—a small miracle in itself. I left the country again for another vacation, and honestly didn’t know if I’d see my home ever again. Brad sent me a long text message, rambling about how I needed to move out because I was the one with the problem, not him.
Brad finally got treatment and left his job, which wasn’t stable to begin with. Around the time he got medicated, he met a girl standing in line at the bank. They supposedly fell in love—she seemed like a clueless naive girl and he was a person in a manic phase who couldn’t tell love from being hyper. The two of them moved to San Francisco—it didn’t hurt that she was having visa issues and had to leave the country sooner rather than later. His dad, who was still sleeping on our couch, had to clean up the whole apartment, and did an amazing job of getting rid of the stuff from the secondhand store. When Brad left, he told me he hoped we could still be friends. “We’ll see,” I said. He was taking his meds, but still in rough shape. Two months later, he proposed to the girl he met at the bank.
I haven’t heard from Brad in a few years now, with one exception. When we were living together, we set up automated rent payments so his account automatically sent me five hundred euros a month and I paid the landlord. He e-mailed me from San Francisco to ask if I’d forgotten to turn off the payment system. I told him that I had settled things with the landlord, but he was the one who had to stop his account from sending me the money every month. He moved out in August 2011, and I’m still getting rent payments from him. I’ve tried to have my bank stop the payments, but they said they couldn’t do anything about it without him canceling the payments—and I don’t know if he ever will. Every time I get five hundred euros from him, I send it back to an account that he probably never checks. I’d feel way too dirty keeping the money.
—N, 29 (M)
THE BUSINESS SHOWER
I STUDIED ABROAD in Eastern Europe, and as a European history major, I was one of the few people who was actually abroad for a reason other than drinking beer. All the study abroad students lived in an apartment building in a swanky suburb, like an island of Americans. I spent two semesters there, and during the first, I lived in a triple. In my second semester, I moved into the single bedroom in our suite, and my three new roommates were a weird bunch. There was Tom, a budding politician who had run for city council in his hometown. He had a big personality and got into philosophical fights with everyone. Then there was an artist named Mitch, who rarely wore pants in the dorms—just long T-shirts and Timberland boots. He also carried around bread in a grocery bag to bars and restaurants because he wanted to save money. And finally, Joe, a preppy frat guy who seemed dumbfounded by the whole experience. We got along well considering how different we were.
Every morning, we all had class at the same time, and there was always a bathroom traffic jam. On more than one occasion, I opened the door to find one of the people from the triple walking out at the same time. I always said, “Whoever needs to get to class or their internship earlier should feel free to go ahead,” but Tom’s response, more than once, was, “Let’s take a business shower.”
This was a weird, awkward thing I’d never heard of before, so I said, “What are you talking about?” And Tom said, “It’s where two roommates take a shower together because they have to get to work or class on time. It’s a totally normal thing.” I laughed it off, because Tom was so goofy. He was openly gay, but I don’t think it was ever meant to be a come-on. It was simply his awkwardness.
A year later, I got back from abroad and saw on some blog that the slang word of the day was “business shower.” I clicked on the link, and the definition went something like this: “An intimate shower taken between two persons solely for the purpose of saving time, completely devoid of any sexual connotation.” There was a sample conversation where two people were talking, and one suggested showering together, to which the response was, “Hey man, that’s gross.” Then the first guy explained it would be a business shower, and the second said, “Aight, dog.” I looked for the author, and it was a username that was similar to one Tom used. I don’t think I’ve ever said, “Hey man, that
’s gross” or “Aight, dog” in my life.
I don’t know if Tom ever told any of our other roommates about the business shower, or whether he heard it from someone else and maybe became the person to write down an official definition online. I never took him up on the business shower, though I’m curious to know what would have happened. Has anyone ever taken a time-saving shower together in real life? I think the answer is to be late to class. No class is important enough to have a potentially scarring shower experience with your roommate.
—N, 28 (M)
THE SUPERYACHT
IN NEW ZEALAND, where I’m from, it’s common to travel overseas after you’ve finished university. Most people don’t have much professional experience yet, so they spend time working as a nanny or traveling. Working on a superyacht is also very popular, because it’s tax-free money, and absolutely everything is paid for—from moisturizer and shampoo in the cupboard to every meal. Most boats have a cook just for the crew.
I traveled around Europe after I graduated, and got an apartment with a friend in the south of France. My friend got her boat job first, and it took me a few more weeks to get my job. I had absolutely no experience and completely made up my CV—I said I’d worked on a fishing yacht—because everyone else faked their résumés too.
I’d heard all these wonderful stories of people working on billionaires’ boats, where they worked on the owner’s third boat—one that was never used—so they got paid tons for not much work. I also had friends who worked on boats for several seasons, and they spent summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean. Charter boats are the ideal, because if someone is renting a boat for a quarter of a million dollars, you assume they’re going to tip incredibly well. You can work really hard for a week and get tipped tens of thousands of dollars. But boat owners don’t tip. You have to take a leap of faith and hope you get a good boat.
