From Kamsar

So I’ve finally made it in to Kamsar after being absent for a while. I’d been missing groceries and other nice essentials, but I made the trip out today. I caught a car out of Bintimodia instead of biking (I’ve been lazy lately, and it’s been getting hotter), but I had to wait like 3 hours for a car to show up. I waited with 4 other adults and a baby at the crossroads out of Bintimodia, and made it in to Kamsar around 1pm.

I got my market stuff taken care of (flour and eggs (gonna make myself a chocolate cake for my birthday), avocado, 3 tomatoes, a can of chicken meat (kinda like spam, but made in the middle-east somewhere), a kilo of potatoes, 3 bell peppers, some envelopes, some plastic baggies, unpopped popcorn, some pasta, canned milk, smoked fish (for Barte), and then I made a trip to the grocery store for a box of saltines (I’m always craving salty crackers in my village, but I never feel like paying $3 for a box of saltines (I could buy 12-15 large bean sandwiches for that much money in Bintimodia) – however I decided to just splurge even though it seems ridiculous to spend so much on saltines of all things. By the way, this was an abnormally bountiful trip to the market – bell peppers, canned meat, tomatoes and avocados aren’t usually easy to find.

Now I’m getting some updates taken care of to my blog before heading off to the pool for a bit (it’ll be nice to swim off all the dust from the road). I would just head straight back home but I want to get my iPod charged before going back to my village (I’ve discovered that I can charge my phone if I go to the “night club” – the open air space where they set up a generator and some speakers on Saturday nights – and hang out with the “DJ” – the guy who sorta knows how to work the CD player and shouts over a microphone every once in a while to make himself feel important – while my phone is plugged in to the string of power strips attached to the generator. However, I feel weird taking my iPod there to be charged, so I still take care of that here in Kamsar).

In village news, I’m still working on grading my huge stack of exams from first semester final exams (I made the mistake of giving my students a test like a week before the “official” final exams (I didn’t know we had official final exams, I was informed the day before they started) so I had like 800 total exams to grade between my 4 classes of English and 4 of Chemistry). If grading my 9th grade English tests, I noticed something funny – everybody had a perfect score, and the few people who didn’t hadn’t made transation mistakes (I had asked them to give me the French of 10 English words (boy, house, rice, etc…)) but rather they had made spelling mistakes making up nonsense words that SOUND like the correct word, but aren’t. So basically, everybody cheated. I was in Boke when this test was given and someone else watched the class take it – clearly that someone else wasn’t watching very carefully or didn’t care. I’ve decided I’m going to fail everybody because I made it clear to them early on that they would get a 0 if I caught them cheating on my tests. I’m going to give everybody an 8 (40%) and tell them that they can bring their grade up my doing well on my second semester tests (which I will proctor myself to avoid cheating). English isn’t officially on the middle school curriculum, so my failing them won’t hurt their chances of getting into high school, but it will hurt their pride and will set an example. I’m going to give them a big lecture on this on Tuesday and tell them about their mass-failure then (my birthday of all days….awesome).

Also, I’ve been going to the fields with one of the ladies in my village (she doesn’t speak a word of French, but we sorta get by on my broken Susu). I’ve been helping her transplant piment (chili pepper) seedlings from a big mass of seedlings into individual spots – basically thinning out the crop so that the strongest seedlings get their own space to turn into a fruit bearing-plant. I’m also going to start my seeds that I brought (zucchini, spinach, tomato, cantaloupe) in plastic baggies and ask for a small corner of her field to grow my vegetables (if they work – and that’s a big if since they’re non-native and nobody here knows how to correctly grow them, myself included – she could then sell extras in the Kamsar market for way more than her chili peppers cost (however, chili peppers are probably much easier to grow, given how cheap they are).

Alright, I suppose that’s all for now, I’m going to post this and take care of some other internet stuff before heading to the pool, and then Bintimodia. Next time I post, I’ll be another year older. Until then!