A Quick Post

Alright, I've made it in to Boke for the weekend to spend Valentine's Day with some other volutneers and get some business taken care of online using the free internet/computer use at the house (I have some letters to write asking NGOs and embassies for books for Bintimodia's Library - at the very least I'll need a French and and English form letter...maybe more later on).

In village news, I made it back from IST and found that my cat thinks his time is better spent at my other neighbor's house (giving me a good reason to finally talk with them some more). In the mornings around 6:45 he starts to meow loudly, paw at my head, paw at the door....eventually I grudgingly open it and the traitor runs off to the other house. He comes home for lunch and leaves again (sometimes, if he's really full he just takes a nap in the house first), at night I have to go round him up and bring him in to sleep....he's basically only my cat 20% of the time now, most of it I'm sleeping. At least this way he can still get my mice if they poke their heads out again (they're nocturnal, and have been absent for a few weeks now) and it also makes finding a cat sitter much easier (yesterday I had an exchange with the woman of the house (who likes my cat the most of the family) that went something like "Tomorrow I go to Boke. 3 days. My cat, he sleeps here, he eats here, it's good?" in Susu, she got the message and agreed, I gave her some money for the food and went on my way).

Also, at some point last week in the middle of the night 2 of my villages water pumps were stolen (one of them was the one that was across the street from me....very annoying). Apparently pumps get stolen fairly often, someone comes in the middle of the night, dismantles it, pulls up the gadgetry that makes it work, and take it to sell to some other village. So now my village is dependent on half the amount of clean water and some families are resorting to drinking well water (cholera risk...along with like 40 other diseases). I've started using well water to bathe and wash my clothes in, but I'm still drinking and washing my dishes in pump water. Apparently nobody wants to step up to pay the money to replace the lost pumps even though there's a fund in place just for this purpose....je ne comprends pas.

Also, my school is in full swing with the first semester final exams, I will write more on this in my next entry as my internet time is limited right now (running the electricity on generator power, other people want internet before the gas runs out). To be continued tomorrow....