A few weeks back I had a case of the blues. A whole sack-full of funk. A real mother-lode of melancholy.
It was gonna take more than a stream, more than a river even, to keep me afloat. It took a whole neighborhood to wash my blues away.
Bujumbura's Quartier Asiatique, or Asian Quarter, is sort of like a local Chinatown. Only, there's no corner carryouts selling egg drop soup, no gray-haired ladies sunning in front of apartment buildings. Instead, there's mosques, import-export shops, and hardware and building supply stores.
I've never in my life been so glad to see a hardware store.
The week had been tough. Moving into a permanent house - after six months of living in the houses of others - had been a big happiness bump. But I had since cleaned my way, literally, into a fever, and the frustrations of outfitting an empty house in a post-conflict, developing African country with no port had started to stack up.
Shopping in a developing country means severely taxing one's tolerance for jumble. The roads are a clot of cars and diesel fumes and dodging motorcycles, and there are no street signs. There's dirt and dust, a press of people, and you must keep control of your wallet at all times.
What's more, you can't find anything. There's no phone book, no yellow pages. Everything, at least in Burundi, is in French. No one has a website. Directions rely on such landmark jewels as "where the pavement ends" or "at the red gate" or "near the new school." Thanks, but I don't know where the new school is, either, and what do I do when there's three red gates?
If you can actually find the right shop, the jumble takes over again. Bolts of cloth trip over each other, tight rows of bright plastic toys scream from overflowing cabinets, aisles are so crammed with appliances it's like one long freak dance just moving around. But, you know that what you want must be in here somewhere, so you keep looking and looking... Until you give up.
The week of my shopping blues, what I really needed was tools and building materials. I needed a hammer and screwdrivers to make household repairs; I needed a proper paint swatch to pick pleasing wall colors; I needed a shower curtain rod. But I didn't know where to go, and I didn't have the French to ask.
Then, just as I was giving up, I found the Asian Quarter.
Taking a motorcycle taxi down the hill from the city center, I drifted past a mosque, past a knot of women with black shawls covering their heads - already, it reminded me of home.
But when I hit the local shops, that's when I really lit up.
It's like paradise! I texted to a friend. The Indian merchants speak English! The headscarfed proprietress of the local grocery store sells dried chickpeas and homemade samosas! The DuraCoat paint shop has 4,000 colors! There's so many hardware stores I can't visit them all!
Finally, I could buy a hammer, some nails, a heavy-duty knife. I could get caulk, a drop cloth, vibrant paint in shades of orange, blue, and red. I could paint that wall, hang that shower curtain, make that lamp, fix that hole in the wall that the ants had made into a tunnel for their highway.
But first, I shopped my blues away in the quartier.
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