now we're cooking with gas!

Of course the gas ran out the day after my husband left on his trip. 

Stoves run on a bottle of gas here, similar to a gas barbeque grill.  Having an electric stove wouldn’t really work out too well because the power cuts pretty often and because the price for electricity is high.  A bottle of gas costs $20 or so to refill.  Mine usually lasts for about 6 weeks.
While I’m in Bamako to teach English I’ve been staying at the house of some friends who are away.  They left a note saying that when the gas runs out there’s a spare bottle in the storage room out back.
 
Today at lunch time I wanted to bake some fish so I lit the oven and popped the pan of fish in.  After 15 minutes I went to open the oven door to check on the fish and I could feel that the stove was only slightly warm and I saw that the fish was still raw.  The gas had run out shortly after I had lit the oven.  Ugh.
So I unscrewed the empty gas bottle from the hose connected to the stove.  Then I thought hard about where the key for the outside storage room might be.  I finally found a bowl of keys by the house’s main door and had to try a half dozen keys before one would go into and turn in the lock on the storage room door.
I found the full bottle in the storage room.  It was thickly coated with dust and webby stuff.  I got the bottle out the door and then brought some water over to rinse it off.  The distance between there and the stove in the kitchen might be 60 feet, but I had to carry the bottle in in 3 segments.  Those things are ridiculously heavy.  I got the bottle to the kitchen and attached the hose to it.  By now I was quite sweaty as the temperature is still 100 or more during the day and it has become very humid as it is raining about once a week.  Soon we will be in rainy season and it will rain every day and the temps will cool off a little bit. 
Now I just needed to turn the knob on top of the gas bottle to open the gas flow and relight the oven to cook the fish.  The knob on top of the bottle wouldn’t budge.  I tried using a towel to get a better grip on it.  I went into the office and dug in some drawers and found some tools.  There was a hammer but no kind of pliers.  I tried banging on the ridges of the knob in the direction to get it to open.  That didn’t work, but it got me much sweatier for the effort.  I don’t know exactly how long everything took me up to this point, but it was a long time.  I finally gave up because I needed to get ready to go teach at school.  I put the pan of fish in the fridge and ate some toast.

After school I came home and the night guard was there.  Most international workers employ guards to, well, guard their house.  The guard will usually water plants and sweep the yard too.  We have never employed a guard, but it is normal for most expats to have them.  Anyway, the guard was there and so I asked him if he could help me with the gas bottle in the kitchen.  Bernard came in and put his big man hands to work but he couldn’t get the knob to budge either.  I felt much less wimpy in that moment.  He left to ask the shopkeeper a couple doors down for a tool to use.  He came back with a not-completely-appropriate-for-the-job pliers type tool.  That didn’t work.  He went back to talk to the shopkeeper.  He came back and asked me if there was a hammer.  I gave it to him.  Several minutes later using the inappropriate pliers and the hammer together, Bernard got the knob to twist.  And I got to eat fish at 9pm.