Life in French Guiana and beyond: Mo èstébékwé

So today I did some more apartment hunting, although really, it was bedroom hunting, since none of them are studios. The first was far away, inexpensive, but a bit dingy and not particularly inviting. The woman who’s renting out the room and I had nothing to say to each other, and she has a small child. But the price was good enough that I couldn’t say no out of hand. Then I went to another place that was a bit removed, but along a bus line. This was very inviting, a bit more expensive but within the range I had wanted to pay. However the woman was very insistent that I be clean in the common areas, which is something I can do but it’s not my default setting, and it was clear that she wanted the place to be immaculate. Plus I wouldn’t be sharing the apartment with her, but rather with a guy who didn’t seem particularly outgoing.
Then I was supposed to meet a friend downtown, but about a half-hour before, I got a call from a woman who was proposing a place to live but was a bit vague about the details. She told me she’d meet me in the library, and so I went in there, and I ran into one of my Creole professor’s friends, who had worked with me last time and who lives around the corner from where I lived last time. We chit-chatted only briefly (and softly, since we were in the library, after all). The woman then picked me up and we talked about my project, and it turns out she knows a LOT of Haitians (including the friend of mine who took me to her friend’s birthday party last time I was here). When we got to her house, not far from the second apartment I’d seen today, she told me why she had been so vague: I wouldn’t have a bedroom. I would have a bed surrounded by mosquito netting on a landing on the upper level. The netting is thick enough that I’d have some privacy but it’s significantly sheerer than a wall. Still, the woman is so well-connected and the price is so cheap that I will probably end up taking it. Plus, she told me that there are monkeys in her backyard in the morning. How cool is that? If I’m lucky, they’ll sing ‘Daydream Believer’, but that’s probably a bit much to hope for. I have one more place to see tomorrow, but if it’s not amazing, I think I’ll take this last place.

The woman I was supposed to meet to be my Creole conversation partner had to cancel because her son got sick. But just before that, I walk into the Internet café, and what do I see?