As I was moving into my new home, my father turned to me and relented that he wished the house could be nicer. Hearing those words from a Gambian as you step into what will be your living space for the next two years is a scary moment.

I winced as I flipped on the light switch to assess the damage.

Luckily, nearly everything was intact (I mean, there’s even a working light switch!). The walls weren’t crumbling from termite damage as they are in some of my friends’ houses and the once leaky roof had been fixed.

The new paint, however, was certainly going to be a problem. In a haste to get to the next job, the carpenter had apparently splashed a thin white primer only as high as he could reach, leaving the walls a streaky mix of dirty yellow and fresh white.

I truly tried to live with the eye-sore for weeks, but eventually it got the better of what I like to call my “eye for detail.” I called the Peace Corps office and explained that their carpenter had done an abysmal job and asked them to deliver me a bucket of paint so I could paint my walls myself. They granted my request on the basis of their belief that a happy volunteer is a productive volunteer and a happy volunteer needs a place to call home.

A few days later, a Peace Corps driver called me and told me to run out to the main road. He pulled up next to me while handing me a plastic bag full of white chalky rocks through the window.

“What is this?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“I heard you wanted paint,” he replied, equally confused.

“Yes, I want paint. What is this?” I tried again.

“It’s your paint. Your family will know what to do,” he said as he drove away.

I sulked home and asked my family if they knew how to magically turn rocks into paint.

“Don’t worry,” my eldest brother, Ebrima, laughed. He agreed to help me the following weekend.

The long weekend came and I woke to find Ebrima coating the front of our house with his own white paint. He looked up with a smile, “When can we do your rooms?”

I surveyed the facade of our once neat home; the window screens, the green trim, the front steps, and everything else in a 10-foot radius, was now splattered with paint.

“Soon,” I said hesitantly, wondering how I could politely un-invite him to painting my two rooms.

The next morning, I handed Ebrima my bag of white chalky rocks and he poured them into a bucket. I reminded him that he was wearing his brand new pants and suggested he change clothes.

“Don’t worry,” he said, grabbing a jug of water to pour into the bucket as I watched not far behind.

Suddenly, the bucket was as Old Faithful, shooting boiling paint-water a foot high. The frothy mixture sprayed everywhere, bubbling over uncontrollably onto the porch, my brand-new bicycle and my brother’s brand-new pants.

My father came out of his house when he heard the racket. He shook his head, grunted and turned back inside, I assumed, not wanting to lose his temper. I ran into my house and grabbed my camera.

Eventually, the geyser of paint-water slowed enough for my brother to pour half of the mixture into another bucket. He snuck into his room to change his pants and then we scrubbed the floor. Unsuccessfully, I might add. My half of our porch now looks like it was mopped using a bucket of paint, because, well, it was.

My brother finally turned to me and again said, “Don’t worry.”

I was worried, though. Especially because soon we would be painting my house — the one we were supposed to be fixing.

In an effort to avoid the disastrous paint splatter outside my family’s home, I moved all my furniture into the back room of my house and taped the edges around the floor in the front room which we would be painting. I got old rice bags and put them down as a tarp.

After lunch, my brother appeared on my doorstep with what appeared to be two former broom heads that he kept calling paint brushes. He dragged the buckets of white wash into my house and we began. In minutes, seconds rather, the paint-water was seeping through the dilapidated rice bags onto the floor.

“Don’t worry,” Ebrima once again offered up.

“I know. It’s fine,” I said, already having thought of the idea that I would later buy colored paint to splatter on the floor for a Jackson Pollock effect.

We spent the afternoon using the brooms to brush the thin liquid on my uneven walls as I continuously complained that it didn’t look white.

“Don’t worry,” Ebrima said again and again, sensing my concern. “Tomorrow it turn white.”

We finished the front room and the once green cement floor looked whiter than the walls were supposed to be.

Despite my repeated explanations that I had an artistic idea for the floor that I would finish later, Ebrima insisted we clean it. After scrubbing the floor on our hands and knees for an hour, I went outside to take a deep breath and a bath.

A few hours later, the floor had dried just as our porch had: looking like someone mopped it with a bucket of paint. I sighed, feeling defeated and wanting to cry.

“I can’t decide if it looks better or worse than before,” I whined to every Peace Corps friend I could get a hold of for a mini-counseling sesh via phone.

I then went to bed and awoke the next morning with a newfound determination to finish the job. The front room’s walls had indeed dried white and they didn’t look horrible despite the uneven job near the ceiling.

I reminded myself that I try not to make it a habit to look at my rice-bag ceiling anyway, for fear that whatever I constantly hear running on top of it will come down. And, I silently repeated my mantra: “Your house is not going to be Better Homes and Gardens. You live in a hut in Africa for crying out loud.”

So, I took a deep breath and prepared to paint the second room, swapping all the furniture around but forgetting the tape and rice bag tarp this time. I called for my younger siblings to come help me since Ebrima had gone out to practice for his football final later that day. I told them to throw paint on the walls and not worry about the mess. “I want to finish in an hour. Ready, set, go.”

The four of us finished the painting but then realized we had no water. It was only 11 a.m. and the tap down the road wouldn’t turn on for at least another hour. Unable to touch anything, we sat on the once-green-now-white-cement floor, covered head to toe in paint and sweat, and waited.

Of course, the tap opened late that day, around half past 1, and I was practically in tears by the time the neighbors came to tell us we could finally fetch water. I didn’t want to saunter through the neighborhood covered in paint, so the kids fetched water while I scrubbed the floor on my hands and knees trying to at least sop up the excess.

Finally, I took a bath and collapsed on the floor in exhaustion, again feeling slightly defeated and wanting to cry.

I again called some of my Peace Corps friends: “I can’t decide if it looks better or worse than before.”

“It looks better,” they lied, trying to reassure me even though they hadn’t even seen my house.

“You’re right,” I sighed. “I’m going to tell myself it looks better. Plus, it really will look better once I get the colors to splatter my floor like Jackson Pollock and paint my mural like, I don’t know, some other artist.”

“A mural?” they each replied, concerned.

“Yeah, next I’m going to paint a mural on one of my walls.”

–JDF

I clearly haven’t learned my lesson yet, so stay tuned, The Great Paint Debacle of 2014 is to be continued…and next time in color!