One of the major issues visitors to Botswana face is the problem of
dehydration.
The air is so dry (today's humidity is only 6%!), so you don't notice
perspiration - it basically just instantly evaporates - so you don't
realise how much water your body is losing.
Once you have lived here for more than a year you begin to notice the
effect on your skin as well - dry skin, cracked feet, cracked lips,
and dry eyes are all a part of life here and extra care has to be taken.
About three weeks back we put an avocado on the counter. But
although ripe and ready to eat, since it had some 'patches' on it that
looked like it might not be the tastiest avocado, of the ones we had
at the time, it got left till last to be eaten. Meanwhile it had
already started to 'shrivel'. So I decided to continue to leave it
out on the counter and just watch it 'dry up'.
We don't really need fruit dehydrator machines here, we just leave it
on the counter top!
I thought you might like to see what happens to an avocado after
sitting on the counter for three weeks in Botswana!
So I placed them on the window sill so I had a nice white background
and recorded the result of my experiment and put it alongside another
fresh one of a similar size to the original size of my shrivelled one,
for you to compare!
(In Brisbane Australia, it would have just gone rotten and mouldy -
but here is just shrank and dried out to less than half its original
size!)
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