Should Have Never Tried It

Shaving with an electric razor...in Petén.

My first razor ever was an electric Norelco handed down from my dad so that he could get a new one. It was one of those right of passage things as a teenager. He showed me how to do the maintenance and I very deliberately took the thing apart (being careful not to mix up blades) and hand brushed it every week. With the amount of hair I had growing at the time it probably only needed to be done every two months, but I did it nonetheless.

Then at 18 I decided that it was much more manly to shave with a straight razor. I have been doing it that way ever since.

Then recently my wife asked me why I never used an electric razor, since both of our dads use them and it seems much easier. She apparently like the idea of not having to clean up hair and dried shaving cream off of everything, every. single. day. Or so I gathered...

So that was my Christmas gift. My one prerequisite was that it be able to be cleaned by running it under water. Not too much, but I dreaded the thought of having to clean it out and I knew this would lead to more cleaning for Shelley as she cleaned up the little hairs I had carefully cleaned out of the razor to leave on the sink. I picked one up at Sam's.

The instructions (yes I read them) said to shave with only the new razor for at least 21 days in order for your face to get used to it. Unfortunately my face never had a chance. Within 21 days I was back in Petén. Not only could it not handle any hair left to grow longer than 12 hours, electric razor manufacturers did not plan for 99% humidity day and night... When hair sticks to your face, it doesn't get cut.

Guatemalans are very particular about the way they look. Even if they don't bathe, they will get their hair wet to make it look like they did. You get no respect if you do not have a neat appearance (pants not shorts and not wrinkled) recently cut hair and a clean shaven face.

If I spend money on something, psychologically I have to use it, even if it doesn't work. I just can't stand the thought that I wasted money, so I will go way out of my way and spend lots of energy to make it work instead of going back to the easy simple way. I'm working on this.

These two things combined to cause me to spend 10-15 minutes at a time just trying to get a close shave so that I didn't look like a "vagabundo." Sometimes twice a day. This caused my face and neck to become so irritated and red that it was more distracting than if I had just grown a beard! People would ask if I got in a fight, or if I got bit by a bug, or if I had a Dengue rash... not to mention the pain when I would sweat (something that starts when you get to Petén and doesn't stop until you leave...or enter Pizza Hut).

Finally after 4 months I bought a cheap "normal" razor at the store and some shaving cream. Less than a minute later I had the best shave of my life and everything was back to normal. I can't stand the thought of throwing the razor away, so it will probably sit in a drawer until my boys can shave...

Review: Food Sanitizer

Disinfecting your fruit and vegetables is a must here and has become second nature to us. I don't think we could go back to the States and not wash everything we bring home from the store at this point. The thought alone makes us sick.

So you have a few options. There are several kinds of chemicals you can buy at the stores here. They are supposed to be tasteless, but we always had a problem when soaking soft-skinned fruits such as blackberries (found once) or strawberries. You can also use bleach to wash your stuff, but the same thing with the taste issue.

Some friends of ours were planning their big move to Mali and told us about a product they had seen and were considering buying. It is the Lotus Food Sanitizer. It claims to sanitize using ozone (O3) which kills everything using that radical extra oxygen molecule. I can say that we haven't gotten sick from what we ate in our house in over a year of using it now. It comes with a spray bottle that you can use for 15 minutes after charging it to clean with, but it does not help with grease or anything else that plain water would have a hard time with. The problem is that there's no way to know if it's working, so we just go back to regular Lysol. It also claims to neutralize odors on things like dog beds, but in this heat our dogs are way more powerful than some stray oxygen molecule.

The best thing though is that there is no taste left at all. A con is that if you are water conscious, you have to refill the bowl each time you use it, which means 4-5 times for us after a once a week fruit and vegetable shopping trip. It also has to be pure water (I'm not sure why since it should technically make the water clean enough to drink) so if you don't have a filter for your water you'll be using a lot of your bottled water to do this when you can just use regular water for the chemical way.

Another recent use we discovered is that it is great for disinfecting baby toys. No soapy residue and no chemicals. After they dry they are good as new.

You have to buy cartridges which cost $5 each but last three months. We are glad we have it, but I would not say this is a life changing purchase like other invaluable products.