December Already?

Alright, so I’ve made it to the internet café here in Kamsar once again, hopefully I can get online to upload this and research the few things I want to research (I keep a post-it note at home where I write down things I want to look up when I get internet, today it says Burkina Film Fest (sometime in February….maybe I’m gonna go if the dates and costs work out ok), herringbone pattern (something that’s come up in like 3 books that I’ve read so far – and I don’t know what it looks like), kitten sucking cloth (my kitten has a habit of burying his face in cloth (usually my dirty clothes that are on the floor), and sucking on the cloth while purring very deeply, I want to know if this is normal cat behavior or if my cat’s just …. special), and fatuous (I want to see if it means what I think it does, I wrote it in my journal without thinking the other day and then I wondered if I used it correctly)). It’s funny how little things that one would normally just look up on wikipedia or google out of curiosity need to be written down ahead of time for me. Otherwise I get here, I write a blog post, check e-mail, check facebook, and don’t know what else to do, then I get home and remember I wanted to look up such and such.

Anyway, enough about my faulty memory – the past couple of weeks have been sort of exciting. I’ve been hanging out in my hammock a lot reading books (I recommend “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife” pretty highly) and grading papers (I never realized how much of teaching is grading papers, and I don’t even give out much homework!). I also have taken to teaching the little kids that come visit me English (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, so far) while they play with my kitten (several times a day – sometimes several times in an hour – my neighborhood kids come over and say “Monsieur Abdoulaye (my Guinean name) – le chat!” (except they pronounce “le chat” as “le ka”) and then if my kitten comes outside they take turns grabbing him and petting him. I tend to keep an eye on them to scold them when they get too rough, but I figure if Barté is unhappy he can always run back in the house, where I don’t let the kids follow. He’s surprisingly patient with them, I hope I haven’t tamed him too much – I want him to fight back if kids (or dogs, other cats, eagles, owls, etc) hurt him.

In other news, we got 29 new trainees last week who are doing their training now. These are all extension volunteers (health, small enterprise development, and agro-forestry) so they are being trained by the group of volunteers who got here last December, but I will get a chance to see them at Christmas which should be cool. We’ve been given a list of potential sites where they will eventually be placed, and unfortunately none are coming near me – but that’s probably because there’s already a relatively high density of volunteers in my region. I gave my old host family a call on Tuesday and was almost immediately passed over to the new trainee who is staying with them. He sounded a bit dazed and confused (he didn’t realize I was a volunteer from the previous training group until the end of the conversation, even though I mentioned it twice) but that’s to be expected for the first couple of weeks, especially the first day with the host family.

I had another mouse in my kitchen yesterday, and while Barté didn’t kill him, he gave him a good chase (after I plopped the cat down right in front of the mouse – he wasn’t too good at realizing there was another animal in the house) back to his hole. Hopefully I can get some cement soon to plug up some holes in my floor and walls.

Also, I think I forgot to mention this in my first post where I mentioned Barté’s name – “Barté” (bar-teh) is Susu for tiger. In reality the é would look like an epsilon (backwards 3), but this keyboard doesn’t have the Susu Alphabet on it (only a couple of letters are different – 2 different types of “e”s, “o”s, and “n”s).

Alright, this is a short blog post, but hopefully I’ll write a longer one next time (next week? Christmas?). Until then!