It all started with a squeak in the room.
My roommate, Sarah woke up myself and my other roommate, Kate, because she was convinced that she could hear a mouse in our room. It was 3 o'clock in the morning, and the three of us were listening intently to a periodic squeaking noise coming from somewhere in the room. Sarah was freaking out, looking under the beds trying to find it. We were searching everywhere for this mouse, at least 20 minutes. Kate suddenly spoke, quietly and thoughtfully, "you know guys... I think that noise is the fan??" We unplugged all the fans and sure enough the squeaking stopped all together. After some laughter, we settled back into our beds under our mosquito netting. Just as I was about to drift back to sleep, Kate spoke and asked, "Is anyone else's face on FIRE?!" We had no idea what she was talking about. "I've got the fire face, oh my god it burns so bad!" Sarah and myself didn't feel anything so we laughed as Kate ran to bathroom to check her face, which had no rash or redness of any type. We decided maybe she was just hot so we thought nothing of it, but Kate was throwing out all types of possibilities, until she landed on this one: "It's gotta be windburn from the giant fan we put in our room". Our room was so hot that earlier that night before we went to bed, we grabbed the giant industrial sized fan from the kitchen and squeezed it into our tiny room. In our tired stupor, we reasoned that this was the most logical conclusion, so we turned off the giant fan to save our faces from the windburn and went to bed.
At 6 am, I woke up realizing that my face too was on fire! It burned so bad and I had no idea why. I tossed and turned for awhile to find a comfortable spot to fall back asleep but no such luck. At this point Sarah and Kate were also awake and rubbing their fire-faces in agony. We couldn't fall back asleep and so we tried to figure out what it could be. The change in humidity from the beach this weekend to back home? Salt water irritation, maybe the sunscreen, a sunburn? We had no idea, but all this morning we've been in so much pain from the burning on our face and in our eyes. Christine, one of our Ghanian program supervisors knew exactly what was going on as soon as we told her about it. She said that it was from the mosquito netting in our rooms! They air out newly unpackaged, mosquito netting for 24 hours each time they put it up, but we think that because we had that industrial fan along with literally 4 other fans in our room, we were just blowing around the mosquito netting chemicals all up in our eyes and face. Lovely, right?? Either way, our faces are less inflamed now and we can rest easy - mystery solved :)
Anyway, all of this was hilarious when it was happening so I figured it was blogosphere worthy. This afternoon will be learning how to Batik, which is the way that people here make all the beautiful cloths and fabrics that are then made in to clothing. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes!
Akpe! (Thank you),
~ Sarah
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