My first time here was like 2 weeks ago. I was just a few days into my time on the island.
I probably just randomly headed out of Casa Varela – the inn where I was lodged, for an unpremeditated walk about, to get some sort of orientation with my new environment.
The water situation at Casa Varela could get annoying. My first few days were pretty fine – everything seemed to operate smoothly. The owner (I think she was the owner of the place) decided to bump me up to an interesting room on the topmost floor. I thought the room was cool – it had its own bathroom, and a balcony. I liked that.
On like the fourth day or so, I was shocked to realise that there was no water flowing in the bathroom.
What? Why is there no water? Is there something wrong with the pipes? Some control knob somewhere is stuck?
It felt like a very strange situation. The past year I had spent across San Francisco and Berlin, had made me accustomed to multi-hour showers and discretionary-lengthed bathtub soaks and central heating, without really having to think about how the underlying plumbing or water supply mechanism worked.
Okay so in San Francisco we used to discuss California’s droughts in class, but that felt like a distant, intellectual concern. I never had water abruptly stop flowing mid-shower because of concerns about a California drought. Things usually just worked without a hitch.
So it was surprising for me, suddenly coming to face this entire layer of operational abstraction that I had been completely oblivious of, for like the past year.
I communicated the issue to Nilton, the building manager.
Initially he just acknowledged the problem and promised to get it resolved ASAP.
When the same issue came up again not long after, he opened up and described the workings of the building’s water supply to me: There was a man who drove by every few days in a water-truck. He had a tank of water attached to his truck, and as he drove by he delivered water to his customers along the route.
Apparently there had been a complication with the arrangement. I’m not quite sure now- maybe he suddenly increased his prices, or he missed a delivery date – something. So essentially there was an issue with the water-truck guy, and consequently we had no water to use at Casa Varela.
Oh.
Okay. On the one hand I’m annoyed that there’s no water, but on the other hand I’m amused at the sort of logistical setup these guys have for their water supply.
Sal island is mostly desert. They get very little rainfall, and so there are practically no freshwater bodies to draw from. I don’t know where the water-truck guy gets his water, but apparently it’s generally in short supply.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a desalination plant somewhere on the island. It seems paradoxical to be completely surrounded by a literal ocean of water, and yet experience a scarcity of water for domestic use. Strange.
I’m no longer at Casa Varela.
I checked out after about two weeks or so. I was running out of money.
Haha.
I do not have a source of income here, and so I generally do what I can to really stretch out every Euro I have. My two week stay at Casa Varela was generally to provide me with essential living amenities while I got a feel for the environment.
Now I live in a cave.
Haah. Haha.
I was walking around Murdeira one day when I came across this small cave by the ocean. I had spent the previous night camping close-by, and then when the sun came up I decide to move about and look around.
I thought the cave looked cool. Eventually I decided to spend some time there, while I pondered on my next steps after leaving Casa Varela.
So far it’s been chill.
Quiet (well except for the waves crashing against the rocky shore about ten feet away).
Serene. Lots of space to think and dream and imagine. And contemplate my life outside the constructs of the societal expectations I felt somewhat boxed-in by.
Living in a literal cave however, you don’t have access to fundamental living amenities. So every now and then I visit a nearby town to charge my electronic devices, use an actual bathroom, and generally reacquaint myself with the foundational infrastructure of human civilisation.
This place seemed like a cool location to do that. Biblioteca Municipal Jorge Barbosa.
My first time here was like 2 weeks ago. I was just a few days into my time on the island. I probably just randomly headed out of Casa Varela for an unpremeditated walk about, to get some sort of orientation with the new environment.
I found the ambience of the library calming and entrancing somewhat. Or maybe I just generally found the whole of Sal island entrancing, because so much felt peculiar and surreal.
Cape Verde is my first time being in an African country that’s not Nigeria. And apparently there’s a unique psychological experience that comes with that.
Being in the US and in Germany – those where mind-unfolding experiences in themselves, but generally I expected those places to be different from what I was familiar with. Consequently I didn’t have any deeply-ingrained expectations for what those societies would be like, or for how people would behave there.
Here in Cape Verde it’s different. This is a society of mostly black people. And apparently 19+ years of living in Nigeria gave me this internalised intuition for how a society of mostly black people generally behaves.
So it’s surreal for me interacting with that society, and then having them mildly conflict with my expectations. For example I come across some random black Cape Verdean guy: In my head my brain has already prepared a template of what I should immediately expect from him, based on how my life experience around black people makes me interpret his visual impression.
And then he opens his mouth and begins to speak Portuguese. Portuguese is soooo different from anything I’ve ever personally heard black people speaking. It shakes up my brain a bit, having to superimpose a black face over the disorienting stream of alien sounds I’m hearing. It feels surreal having people here jar my expectations like that.
It’s like I’m hallucinating. Or I’m being pranked, and the Cape Verdean guy is just speaking Portuguese to weird me out.
It’s just startling in this stimulating, other-worldly way – like someone is passing a mild electric current through my body. Haha.
The library is chill. Quiet.
I still get surprised by just how few people are on this island. At any given point you’re like a 15-minute walk away from being smack in the middle of the desert with no human being in sight. It’s crazy.
Right now I’m the only one in the library. Me and the librarian at her desk by the door. I think there’s someone seated in a corner by my right, but I don’t know for sure. The view is obstructed by a bunch of bookshelves.
I recently got in touch with a Biodiversity NGO at Santa Maria – the touristy town at the southernmost end of the island. Somehow I persuaded the Spanish Directors to give me a bunch of their Sea Turtle Nesting data, so I could carry out some AI/Machine Learning analysis on it. The aim is to uncover patterns/inferences which’ll be useful to them, so they paid me some money for it. That was great. I need money.
So now I’m here, chilling in this library surrounded by Portuguese books that are mostly unintelligible to me, sitting on a chair and with my things on a table, in an actual building with walls and a roof, connected to electricity and doing some stuff on my computer.
I like this vibe. Haha.
End of Part 1.
Image:
Chilling in the library.
Mayowa Osibodu's Blog. 