Category: Everyday stuff

A few years ago, a wondrous thing occurred.  The electric company came to town, put up poles, and gave us light! 

So, the electric company was coming through, cutting down trees in front of people’s houses to make room for the wires.  That wood legally belonged to the homeowners, but it was being taken away.  A friend of mine saw them cut down her tree, and said, "That’s my wood!  Leave it here.  If you don’t agree, we’ll just go to the mayor’s office and see who’s right."  The electric company backed down, and left her wood and everyone else’s after her.

Women are really not respected here.  On top of that, my friend has only a few years of elementary school education.  She’s my hero for standing up for herself and her kids-she’s a widow, and needs every log she can get!

The
other day, one of the ladies that is teaching me her language came over and wanted to use my scale.  She had been to the clinic because she wasn’t feeling well.  They weighed her, but she was convinced that their scale was wrong.  It said that she weighed 220, and that was impossible.  After a few minutes and much discussion, I realized that she is used to being weighed in kilos, but for some reason had been weighed in pounds.  She surely didn’t weigh 220 kilos, that is 485 pounds. 

Then the fun began.  You see, this friend is a good language teacher because she forces me to use her language instead of French.  Her method is very simple-she doesn’t know French.  That’s why I picked her to help me.  It’s usually very good, but in this case, I was stumped as to how I was going to explain the difference between pounds and kilos using no words.

I ended up getting a big basin of dry cat food out.  Then I measured it twice-once with big bowls and once with small ones.  She got it immediately-that’s how they measure things to be sold in the market, with different sized bowls, like the salt in the picture.  The small bowl was like pounds and the big one was like kilos.  She then explained it to a man that was sitting with us during this whole discussion – he took longer to understand.  I think that’s because men don’t usually buy things at the market that are measured in bowls.  I was pretty pleased with myself managing to get my message across with two words (big and small), two bowls, and a lot of cat food.

Meet my travel mosquito net!  This wondrous thing is currently sitting on top of my bed in a guest room where I’m about to have 10 days of retreat and meetings with my colleagues here.

This is a great mosquito net.  Nothing is getting in here, and it’s not hung by strings all over the room!  There are some improvements to be made, though-the bottom is nylon, which is great for keeping unwanted nighttime visitors out, but very hot.  I’m in the process of having quilt patches sewn to the nylon to take care of that.  It’s also pretty hot inside the net, no breeze gets in because it’s really fine mesh.  So, I keep a battery operated fan inside-it’s just enough to let me sleep.

My other sleeping trick when I’m away from home is a frozen water bottle.  Snuggle up to that, and cool right off!

For people that serve overseas like me, goodbyes happen all of the time.  My visitor just left today-right now I’m too tired to miss her, but that will come as soon as I get some sleep.  Goodbyes get old, you know?

There’s a children’s book that explains really well how it is for me-not just the goodbyes, but having my home and my heart on two continents.  There’s a line towards the end that has it just right-I don’t have the book here, but it’s something like, "When I’m here I wish I were there, and when I’m there I wish I were here."  I don’t have that right, though, because that makes it sound like I’m unhappy and not content wherever I am, which is not the case at all.  But, no matter where I am, there is a piece of me that wants to be somewhere else.  Ugh-I am not a wordsmith!  Can someone help me with how the award winning author put it in his book?

There are four seasons here: dry, Harmattan, wretched, and rainy. 
September-November is dry season.  No rain, temps always in the upper 90s.  But, it’s a dry heat.  Really!
December-January is Harmattan, a dry wind from the Sahara.  That’s the coolest time of year.  Instead of snow, there’s dust everywhere.  When I got back here, I was really bothered by all the dust, so I put everything I could in any plastic I could find.  Love those huge ziplocs!
February-April I call wretched season.  It’s really humid and over 100 almost every day.  No one does much during this season, so it was a good time for me to learn language-people had time to talk.
May-September is the rainy season.  Normally it rains almost every day, and sometimes gets down into the 70s.  This year, though, the rains have been strange, which could be a big problem for the farmers that I live among.  I hope not.

Here’s the purse my friend crocheted out of old plastic bags.  Pretty cool, huh?  Now we’re working on a pattern for cell phone holders-there’s a market for that, and they’re smaller.