Ouaga Ouaga Ouaga (please say with a Fozzie the Bear voice)

Well, life is going pretty well for me these days and it only seems to keep going my way. I was just up north on a somewhat "under the radar" vacation to visit some friends (I'm "not allowed" to leave my region for the first 3 months in village). But my vacation was cut short a day to come to Ouaga due to a run-in between a table and my eye (in typical klutzy Kara fashion). Everything's okey dokey in that department, but my stomach's another story. It feels like there's a raccoon trying to get out there these days. But there's no better place to be when feeling a bit ill, so it's not so bad. I've already started the meds for it.

Not sure how long I'll be here, maybe one or two days more. I need to do some major shopping to get things I didn't get last time I was here. My house is pathetically empty and devoid of any comforts at all. I only recently got a mattress, I was sleeping on the floor for a month. Luckily, being the minimilist that I am, it hasn't been a horrible experience. In fact, the last month and a half in village has been absolutely wonderful. I've been doing a ton of "cultivating". In fact, I have some seeds from the Ag garden already popping up. And I own my own "daba", which is the Burnkinabe version of a hoe, but with a shorter handle. You just bend at the waist and go for it. It doesn't hurt my back as much as I thought it would. Beyond that, I've been discovering all that is village life, such as the nightly "cinema" which is just a bunch of people watching a bad 80s action film dubbed in French on a TV outside. I find it very entertaining and it's good for my French. And I've also taken a liking to liver and onions, which is served on the side of the road (grilled while I wait) if you can believe that. Vegetarianism definitely was left behind in the states.

My recent vacation was a really good time, too. I went to the villages of Tougouri, Yalgo and Bani to visit Josh, Patrice and Adam, respectively. Getting to Yalgo was quite interesting. Just before town, the road crosses the "barage" (which essentially means that the road is acting as a dam but still alowing some water to pass over it), but right now the water is so high that's it's not very safe for cars to cross (just another prime example of the civil engineering I'm dealing with here), so you have to cross it on foot. Weee! The current was surprisingly strong and on my first cross 2 men took my bike across while a third had a death grip on my wrist and walked with me. On the trip back, there was a less strong current, making it less scary and a little more fun. Seeing my friends was great. It'd been over a month and it was nice to be back with the people I know the most here. I also got two decent sized bike rides in on the trip. The first was a doozy at 40km (against the wind!), but very necessary since the bus was running really late and I needed to catch a transport at the the next city (and that was a good decision, since the bus never came). The second (20km) ride was really nice between Yalgo and Bani, but quite muddy.

Well, I hope all is good in AmericaLand, if that's where you are. Hopefully I can shoot out some emails soon to those of you who sent me some, but gmail disappeared on the internet or something. Hopefully it'll be back up before I take off for village.