Monday, July 25, 2011

two ears of corn

That is the title of a book about development. Another good book for those of you who are inclined towards gardening is "How to Grow More Vegetables." It is a book about bio-intensive gardening. We use a lot of its techniques.

Nampoch has a new (replacement) pump. I will write a post about it later.

Its grilled corn season! Women and girls grill young corn over charcoal and sell it along the roads. So freaking good. Its not sweet corn, but I love it.

It got me thinking about how seasonal the foods are here. Like cashew fruit or mangos or grapes-- stuff comes into season, gets eaten intensively, then disappears for a year. Its kind of an exaggeration but not quite.

One thing that I like about Peace Corps is that there is a high possibility every day of something happening that completely surprises me. Today, for example, I went with Alisha, Katie K, Maggie, and Ben Conway on a field trip to this farm where this guy uses extensive agro-forestry techniques. It was pretty cool. On the way back though, we were walking to town along the Route National in hopes of finding a car back to Kara. This Chinese engineer in a crew-cab Tundra pulled up and gestured at us to get in. He spoke about 5 words of French and no English. His Togolese helped told us that he is part working on the road construction projects that bracket Kara. It was really cool/bizarre. The engineer took us to Kara and even went out of his way to drop us off where we needed to be.

I am really tired of traveling. I got back to my village on Wednesday. Then, on Saturday, I went to Bassar for a west Kara going-away party for Matt and Emily Pike. Their service is done, and they are leaving in a couple of weeks. It is really sad. This is monday, and I am in Kara.

I am sort of scared to go back to Nampoch though. Last Wednesday a 1.5 year-old kid dropped dead. then Friday, a 9 year old came back from the field and dropped dead. No noticeable symptoms in either case. Seriously. Its weird.

The river has ceased to be challenging and is now scary. I took a boat across it on my way home.

I fed Nigarmi and Mullet (Nigarmi's big brother. I am babysitting him for Jen) sardines the other night when I got home. Then Nigarmi caught a mouse. Which he apparently ate whole . . . then barfed it up on my lit picot. I just wanted to share that.

I don't have any weird bug stories this time. Unless you want to check out poultry lice. Alisha's compound was infested with those. They drove everyone nuts.

I hate PCs. I have this virus that is screwing up my computer and I don't have the resources to take care of it.

1 comment:

  1. Freaky thing with those kids dropping dead ... don't die!!

    And the thrown up mouse...gross. Definitely didn't need to know that :)

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