Another Story

Welcome esteemed reader to today's edition of “This African Life”. This edition is brought to you by wonderful readers such as yourself who have taken upon themselves to call me to complain about not enough updates. Therefore, I shall try and flesh out more of life here, although to be quite honest it has become routine for me so not quite that interesting. Although there are definitely little things to keep it interesting (like little friends hanging out in the corner of your shower that you don't notice until halfway through). Without much other prattling, we shall commence today's program.

Alors, village life. That wonderful period of time that is the majority of the program I find myself in here. Not much has changed here. Market days are still the most exciting day of the week, I rather enjoy going there in the afternoon and doing whatever; be it drinking a calabash or two of tchouk or digging through tshirts looking for the perfect new one to add to my collection. When I say dig, I mean it. Picture piles of clothing splayed out on tarps with someone standing in the middle of it all yelling out the price of different things, and turning over the materials to bring stuff up from the bottom. The best part is that this is the African version of Goodwill, I mean for ~$0.25 I can get some pretty sweet tshirts or dress shirts if I'm lucky. Also all sorts of fun things to eat abound, be it dog to frog, you can find someone selling little morsels of it all. What better way to get protein?

Life beyond market days is different, thats when I do work. I've started teaching solo at Plan International to middle school kids. Its definitely a challenge, my French is still rocky but I can use hand motions as fillers and have a counterpart that helps out when I need it. But in general I get to just be on my own and interact with the kids. That takes up my afternoons two days of the week. Beyond that, I have mornings at my NGO giving advice on all sorts of stuff. Right now its web design advice, which seems to have become my niche here in country. I'm still in the middle of developing a site for CODHANI, a handicap cooperative in the north of the country, but am making some pretty sweet progress. Its pretty much just a great mix of all sorts of stuff at the moment. I also help out other volunteers near me on stuff too, from sitting and being one of the “token white guy's” at a anti-AIDS formation to being asked via text message to “bring your machete and a camera, we're gonna trim trees” at Nikhil's organization's building. Thats how life kind of goes here.

Its still hot. This month is when the rain is supposed to start for good, which will be great. It rained heavy on Saturday night, which kind of ended my phone call with Brad when I saw lightning hit next to the cell tower in ville. It cooled everything down very nicely though, and Sunday was a chilly 80 degrees all day. Yea, I was wearing pants and feeling cold. Right now its about 6pm and ~100 degrees inside my house and it feels ok. I like having an internal and external thermometer now, it lets me measure the difference and figure what differing degrees of hot truly feel like. When the rains come every day it will be so nice to feel cool again...

World cup qualifying is going on again. We played Cameroon on Saturday and won 1-0. I was invited to watch the game at the house of some of the kids who live by me. Theres not much else comparable to soccer games here, I may be missing the NCAA tournament but hey at least I get to see people go crazier here over a ball. I mean after we won, the streets were full of people cheering and talking about the game. People were draped in the flag and running up and down the street. I haven't been quite privy to see stuff like that before, not even when the Colts won the superbowl. Its really awesome.

Continuing on with our story, I shall weave in a bit of an afternoon that occurred recently. One of my kids came over during repo/lunch time and I taught him how to cook some stuff. Made “chicken” soup (the only thing chicken was the bouillon cubes that I used) and he was amazed by the veggies I added and the gas tank as opposed to charbon. He also had never had potatoes before, so I gave him a raw piece and then a cooked piece so he could taste the difference. Entertaining to say the least.

Then the afternoon itself was just fantastic. Went and watched some soccer games at the stadium here in ville, all the CEG/Lycee kids were playing each other (the girls that is) and it was awesome. Got some fun photos and videos. The fun part was the fact that I went with my kids and watched another one of my kids play for one of the CEG's. I got the cutest picture in the world too of one of my neighbors...she is absolutely adorable. I'm afraid of the reactions I'm going to get to some of these pictures back home...I think that the family will want me to bring kids back with me! Oh and after soccer, I come home to my neighbor bringing me dinner. Bean cakes with sauce and onions? Delicious! I eat, say thanks, and take off to Nikhil's house to prep for tomorrow morning (cultural presentation, I'm doing trivia and giving out candy!) and on the way got cadeau'd a bunch of mangoes. And now there are wicked huge thunderstorms. Hows that for an amazing afternoon/evening?

The following day's cultural week presentation went quite well also. Asked a bunch of trivia questions about the US and our culture and gave out candy to people who got the answers right. Then assisted Nikhil with a presentation on American music. Got to play all sorts of music and dance around like a crazy person, win-win for me. Now its April. Coming up on the 1 year mark, kind of hard to believe. I thought the other day at the bank what I was doing a year ago this time and just was kind of in awe at how much had changed over the past 365 days. Then it dawned on me that I couldn't be happier anywhere else in the world than where I am now.

What can I say, I've grown to love it here.