I’m not an outwardly religious person, but I think that God has a gentle way of effectively signaling to me when I whine needlessly about trivial matters.

Today I got the chance to take a trip out with the housing folks to check on my prospective apartment. There are still a number of snags to be smoothed before I can call this place my own, but I will post some of the pictures that I snapped (Murphy be damned).

A really new building (lots of construction in Dakar)!

This might be my furniture (it’s going to be furnished)!

A nice potential view, n’est-ce pas?

And a place to put all of my cool kitchen appliances! I’d be able to cook normally again!

Someone is still living there, but you get the idea….

All the girls reading this entry will appreciate that I find the bathroom photo-worthy

As you can see, it’s a really nice place that is two bedrooms larger than my hated apartment in Arlington. It’s also close to the university, the markets and even a great spa that I went to this past weekend. Still, being the eternal pessimist that I am, I won’t count my chickens until the lease is signed and the moving truck shows up with my COSTCO spoils.

All of that said, my pessimism and sour mood found a counterbalance today when threads of relativity were woven into my daily routine.

First, the highly capable woman who runs the housing selection for the entire posst (and has patience that must parallel Job’s) is originally from Haiti. She’s in one of the pictures above. When she told me two weeks ago where she was from, all I could say was

“Et ta famille, Ça va?” (How is your family doing?)

Her short answer was “They’re living in the streets, but ça va.” Today I asked again how her family was doing (as Haiti fades from the news headlines), and all I got was the typical Senegalese response “Ça va” which can mean anything from “I’m fine” to “My arm is falling off from gangrene but yeah, I’m fine”. I decided not to push the subject any further.

Today’s second reality check is one that I am still grappling with: it involves a script from a documentary film. It was sent as a prospective project to keep me busy while I waited for my new life to settle. The director needs it translated so that subtitles can be added, and my level of French was deemed good enough to provide an accurate translation into English. After a cursory look at the document, I knew that I could probably offer up my services if I could just muster the motivation to commit to the project. After I got back from my housing trip this morning, boredom rapidly set in and I decided to start working in earnest on the translation. I was still feeling kinda frustrated at my stagnant life, and I wanted some busywork to get my mind off the lack of progress that morning.

I no longer feel frustrated. Between working with our tireless Haitian housing officer and the first five pages of translation work, I now feel pretty good about my amazingly easy life. Why is this? The documentary that I am working on contains page after page of testimonials from the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Never did I imagine that I would set upon expanding my French vocabulary by learning new words to describe dying, swamps, clubs (as in weapons), grave digging, and skulls. But I find myself going over and over each paragraph, trying to ensure that I do the best job possible to make it read well in English- trying to find tactile synonyms for overused words like “massacre” and “genocide” so that I efficiently portray the emotion that so profoundly runs through this documentary (I haven’t even watched the film yet, but the words stand on their own).

Was I really just complaining about a couple of Filipino guys forcing food down my throat a couple of nights ago?

So all of this perspective reminds me of something that Perry Farrell once wrote: “Sometimes to realize you were well someone must come along and hurt you.” I am incredibly fortunate not to find myself in such extremis, but I know what he means.

I know as a spoiled American that I will be sure to find something in my day tomorrow that will annoy me and send me to my computer in search of some kind of validation by you all. That’s kind of the nature of the world. Still, for right now, I’ll just sit and work on the rest of this translation, and not worry about whether or not I’ll get that sparkling new apartment in the clouds.