Why My Parents Rock and Other Delights

The head of the philosophy department has extended a wealth of useful information to help us adapt to Accra. One gem is Milton Sterilizing Fluid, which is useful for cleaning vegetables that you might not want to peel because of nutrients lost with the discarded skin or that you can’t peel, such as lettuce. Basically, the stuff makes it possible to have salad – and salad is for sure a delight. The fluid is intended “for sterilizing baby bottles and teats without boiling” and claims to “kill all known germs including thrush.” The only thing in Milton Sterilizing Fluid is sodium but a light rinse removes any taste of it. An alternative is to dip produce in a dilute bleach solution and, well, ick to that.

You can find containers of toothpicks on each table in the guesthouse dining room. Their label announces that they are beautiful and practical. I had never thought of this before but why yes, indeed, toothpicks are. I mean, practical I get right away. But have you ever really looked at a toothpick? It’s a dandy – and delightful – example of minimal, streamlined and simple design aesthetic married to function.

In a place where electricity is a kind of random event, any time you flick a switch and power up a fan, a light, or a burner brings a sense of delight. There are two advantages to the switch with a little light;  it both tells you that power is coming to the switch and reminds you that power is coming to the switch. 

This particular switch turns on the small hot water tank hidden in a bathroom cupboard. There seems to be no temperature control on the tank, so five minutes of power in morning provides (literally) scalding hot water for a shower and regular hot water for the rest of the day. As cheesy as this sounds, the light is a delight, reminding us to not waste a precious commodity by keeping unused water unreasonably hot. (BTW, the down position is on over here.)

Getting mail is always a delight, but you might need some back-story for why this particular piece of mail moved us from mere delight to something closer to ecstasy. See, we don’t use paper towels. All our mopping up is done with cloth that can be re-used. Here, absorbent cloth is difficult to locate and, when you do find it, distressingly expensive given its poor quality. So I sent a distress signal to my parental units and in mere weeks received a fat bundle of permeable delight. (Thanks folks!)