zot in Niger bush camels

Yesterday I was in Tindo to meet with a groupement. We had a fairly productive meeting and I left with a couple of good ideas for formations. I also broke the idea of putting an agroforestry volunteer with them, but they didn’t seem ecstatic about it so I will probably drop it.

But the real reason I am here writing this post is to report a sneak attack by some ants. I have been putting off doing my laundry, and so I was rummaging through the dirty clothes to find my lounging shorts. Being a no-electricity night, it was rather dark, and when I found them I happily put them on. Of course, it didn’t take me very long to discover that the ants had turned by clothes pile into a hangout spot. Needless to say, I got those shorts off pretty quickly, though not before sustaining several bits in rather sensitive areas. Now all my clothes are piled in the center of my house and there is a big pile of dead ants in the corner where my clothes used to sit.

Anyway, not a lot to report other than that. With Mary gone I have yet to cook a real meal, so I have been living off popcorn, bread with avocado or cheese spread, and a box of Tiger’s Milk bars that my dad sent me a long time ago but only arrived with the last mail run.

Being back at site without Mary is being difficult, but these are old battles that I don’t want to revisit on my blog. Some good things are happening. Tomorrow I head to Tindo again to meet with a groupement there for the second time. We are going to review their finances and management of money practices. Then Monday is the second meeting of my business group, and Tuesday I am meeting with another groupement to discuss how we can work together. Monday I will also meet with my counterpart to discuss the elaboration of themes for the entrepreneur’s workshop that they are planning on doing. So work is going fairly well, which is good for getting me out of the house and especially good for making me feel like I am doing something worthwhile.

My garden is amazing. My cilantro is exploding, and my peas are already about two feet tall. I also have good watermelon plants and some basil. The other stuff doesn’t seem to have come up much. Spinach is non-existent, as is thyme, parsley, sage, and oregano. I might have three bell pepper plants or so, but I am not sure they are actually bell peppers and not some weed. Still things grow so much more quickly at 1000 feet, daily rains and temperatures between 80 and 100 than they do at 7,500 feet and temperatures between 40 and 80. I suppose that goes without saying, but its still surprising.

While Mary was here we had a series of ‘worsts.’ I wanted to remember them all, but instead I forgot most of them. We had “Worst Pet Owner Ever” (when I accidentally dripped a ginger drink in my cat’s eye). And then there was “Worst Volunteer Ever” (when I accidentally called a six year old girl a penis instead of saying “it’s good” in local language. The differences are relatively small and I had just learned both phrases). We also had some great headlines relating bizarre life here.

I am trying to put a little thought into what I want to do when my service is finished. I did some research into school in France. There is a one year program that starts in English and moves to French, includes French classes, and provides the first year of a master’s degree, and then you can apply to French schools to finish the second year. I also am interested in doing a third year of Peace Corps service in Morocco or Jordan. There is an Arabic teacher here and I could learn Arabic and then go to one of those places to actually speak it for a year. Or I could apply for the Foreign Service or some other international position. Then there is law school in all its variations (Northwestern’s two year program, standard three years, Cornell’s two years in the US two years in France program, or a dual Master’s and JD).

I think law school is in my future, and I am feeling like getting another M.S. would be, not exactly wasteful, but possibly not worth the two years it would take. I like the idea of a third year of service, but I would have to find an NGO in Jordan or Morocco that wanted to take a volunteer with no speaking background in Arabic. And most of Morocco ends up being a berber language anyway. Then there’s the Foreign Service, which could be really cool, except that I am starting to feel the need to set down roots, and I don’t know that I want to live the expat life. A French M.S. in economics would be neat, but I don’t know that I would want to live and work in France after that point, and again there is the questionability of whether it would be worth it or not.

I have been trying to get law school web sites downloaded onto my laptop so that I can research schools without paying for internet, but it is slow going and I am having technical difficulties.

Things can come together rather suddenly it seems, and I find myself now preparing to give a presentation of my business group initiative on Monday. It will be announced over the radio today and tomorrow, and it is possible that a rather large number of people will show up. I’ve actually been pretty busy over the past several days trying to find a building and inform people and get participation from the responsables, all of which appears to have worked out fairly well. Now I just have to actually put my presentation together and rehearse it in French so that I am not stumbling over each word.

Mary and I have been reading a lot, with the goal of actually finishing reading a book together, and I’m more than half way through an great book on the history of law in the 20th century that she brought over for me. The weather has been often cloudy, but it hasn’t actually rained much, and certainly not as hard as I had expected by this point.

The mailrun comes tomorrow, Monday is my formation, and then Tuesday we leave for Conakry. Time, as in the rest of the world, has the quality of moving both slowly and very quickly, but the past few weeks have gone rather faster than I anticipated, and I think we are both a little stunned that her visit is almost over. In Conakry we hope to do some shopping, and hopefully there won’t be a ton of volunteers at the volunteer house. A new education stage arrived a couple of days ago and they will be leaving I think on Monday, so I don’t expect a lot of other volunteers to be there, but we will see.

I’ll report back some time after the formation on Monday to let you know how it went, and hopefully I’ll have the chance to post some pictures while I’m in Conakry.