How To Stay Cool During the Hot Season

• Procure a fan. It is now your best friend. Take good care of it, and it will take good care of you.
• Find a shady place to sit. If you can manage to do so gracefully, lying spread-eagle on the concrete floor is surprisingly comfortable. You may choose to sleep like this on nights over 90 degrees. If you do so, close the blinds so that you manage to keep some shred of respect in your community.
• Drink lots of cold water. The amount you drink should be equal or more to the gallons per minute of sweat that is pouring out of your body.
• Have a bowl of water nearby to sprinkle on yourself periodically as you sit in a heat-indued stupor. As it evaporates, close your eyes and imagine you are in Scandinavia. This is possibly the closest you get to feeling cold, so enjoy it.
• Send text messages of condolence to your neighbors and others in similarly hot places to remind yourself you're not alone. If it makes you feel better, spread malicious rumors about those lucky volunteers who got sent to the cooler climates. (Serves them right. Hope they get Schisto or malaria.)
• Whenever you are in a city, find a place with air conditioning, order an iced coffee, and vegetate for several hours under the AC unit. Meditate on what it feels like and memorize the sensation, so that when you are at your house, slowly melting away, you can transport yourself back to your Happy Place.
• Buy a big bucket, fill with water and ice. Invite your friend and his/her bucket over and sit on the porch together, inside your buckets, chatting the hottest part of the day away. Laugh because the locals think you're positively insane at this point. Drastic times and all that.
• When all else fails, remind yourself why you are here in the first place. And remind yourself that, while you're only going to be here for 2 years and you have the luxury of a fan and a minifridge, your neighbors live here year-round and do not have these things. Tell yourself to stop being such a wimp and suck it up.