Washing the Kitchen Floor

My Cameroon kitchen is probably where I spend half of my time in the country. Since food preparation is from scratch for the most part (see “Chimichungas in Africa”) and there are sanitary and cook-the-crap-out-of-it techniques to be taken into consideration, if one wants to eat well in Cameroon, he/she must spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So, voila. Spending a lot of time in the kitchen inevitably means that the kitchen will be filthy.

I don’t like a messy kitchen… but sometimes there is only so much a person can do. For instance, in the meat grinding process, oftentimes ground meat bits will fall to the cement floor. This is a space in between the water filter stand and the counter table… and often laden with spider webs. And since the meat grinding process involves cleaning more directly/regularly handled such as the grinder itself and the counter, those chunks are often forgotten… for a little while. They are too small to smell, so instead they form little dried-lava-like blisters on the floor.

One of the more frequent activities is bread making. Flour tends to fly in the process, landing on the floor around the counter… near the door…. On the window. You would be right to think that it could be easily swept up, but I have to wash my hands and get the bowl cleaned and greased and get the counter clean… and it just gets forgotten. For some reason, flour on a cement floor in Africa morphs into a paste which cannot be removed from the floor without sandpaper.

So, its not easy. I did make one enormous error not long after moving into the house that has added the the kitchen mess for some months. I had a bit of a rat problem for a few weeks, and tried a number of different traps. I discovered that “rat glue,” a non-poisonous ultra-strong rubber cement, was the best means of getting the little pooping terrors. You put the glue onto a piece of cardboard, the rats get stuck in it and then you throw their writhing little bodies out to the skinks. Worked great… except the glue changed properties after a little while on the cardboard and oozed off onto the cement. No big deal that I couldn’t get it off (they said kerosene works… but it doesn’t. Dang Nigerians.) as it was in places where I didn’t walk. But then the rats started glueing themselves to the floor. I have to scrape them off with a cutlass after waiting for them to die. It’s terrible, but that’s kind of the consequence for eating my boxes of jell-o pudding, huh? These patches also catch crickets, ants, enormous spiders and hornets.

Other things… if the power goes out for more than 6 hours, the freezer starts to melt a terrible gas or oil smelling water that ruins most things in the fridge and gets all over the floor. Coffee beans sometimes fly (look out!) of the hand grinder and land in places where I don’t notice them until I step on one. Tomatoes rot and bananas go bad and sometimes they hide from me… and sometimes they ooze. We Peace Corps and our gas plates use a huge number of matches each day, and you try to get them all in the trash… but. And I always have people over, and they never put the butter away. And of course, there is that minor detail of very frequently (like… 95% of the daytime), I don’t have running water.

Today (yes, this morning.) I washed my kitchen floor. I’m going to try to make it a more frequent practice… especially since the rains are back and things could potentially get really nasty. The soapy (bleachy) water ran brown out the back door, littered with cricket carcasses and njama njama leaves. But give me a little credit. I do make good bread (… and buttermilk fried chicken, meatball subs, artichoke dip... do you know what we’re up against? Pounded cocoyams and sauce made of limestone and orange oil).

(I’ve also started to regularly burn my kitchen garbage. The kids run to the pile while I pour on kerosene, begging me for “the container,” I say, “no… its trash” and light a match. As soon as I turn my back, they start pulling flaming tuna packets and buttery paper towels out.)