the hot season returns

During the cold season, one easily forgets the misery of a Mauritanian summer. Here are some ways you know it is officially “ceedu.”
-Anything metal is warm to the touch. Anything that has been sitting in the sun one must avoid totally, especially water.
-I stay in shaded spaces for exceptionally long periods of time (be it under a small tree in the road or a random person’s house) in dread of being exposed to the sun. Along similar lines, I rule out any outside activity after 10am by simply asking myself if the sun time is worth what I will achieve while being in it. It never is.
-If doing laundry, one shirt will dry in the time it takes to wash the next one.
-Plunging my hand into a bowl of warm greasy rice is at its all time unappetizing.
-Objects get ruined simply by being in the heat. Candles melt into each other and soap congeals. Most impressively, the thermometer that had been so useful, was consistently at the 120 degrees mark (as high as it will go) until the mercury finally burst through the top.

What does one do during this time when sand storms make being outside unbearable, but indoors is literally an oven with a tin roof? Go to Senegal, the people of Garly tell me.