Wednesday, November 16, 2011

American Pennies and Hellos

The magnitude of this post may not resonate with everyone that reads it but, for my family, it will have a lot of meaning so I will spare everyone the backstory and just say what happened...

I designated today "washing day", meaning I was going to run through the process of hand washing and line drying all of my clothes, towels, etc. This is an all day event that is normally painstaking, monotonous, and decidedly unappealing. But today was different. Why? Because every time I went back to the clothes in my bathtub I saw a penny - an American penny heads up. 

The first one was in my load of underwear. It was just sitting there in the water. I was perplexed by the discovery but didn't think much of it and just moved the penny to the windowsill. After finishing that load, I started in on my second. After the shirts had been soaking for some time, I went back to rinse them and found the second penny heads up sitting on the side of the bathtub. On the side of the tub! I looked to see if the first penny had somehow fallen but no it was still on the windowsill. I picked up the second penny and put it next to the first. And just now, when I went to take the last load of laundry out to dry on the line, a third American penny was sitting in the middle of the tub heads up! Whoa!

Obviously American pennies are not common here. Why would they be? This is Botswana. I don't even have any pennies of my own anymore because I gave all of my American coins to my little host sister at the end of homestay. So where did these come from? All I have to say is HI DADDY!

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