First Visitor

Ian:












came to my site yesterday. He BIKED here. I could not do that. For sure. He said it took 2 hours and 40 min with some long breaks. Which doesn’t seem like very long. But he is in better shape than I am, to be sure.

We spent the day mostly trying to get water! The water issue is huge at my site. Water is FAR and it’s difficult for me to get. In the end we ended up getting two big bidons and one small bidon from the pump with the help of a young dude from my village and his wheelbarrow. But it took all day.

We also went down to one of the changols so Ian could have a bath and I gave the dog a bath. When we were walking down there, I had Yogi in my tote bag and he was like, “Hey LA! Way to bring dogs in bags to Africa.”

After, we walked through the marche a bit. There were tomatoes! And eggplants! And sweet potatoes! This is the first time I have seen any of those things in my marche and I bought all of them. Oh, and hard boiled eggs, which we enjoyed for lunch on French bread with Laughing Cow cheese. I can’t wait for avocadoes to show up in my marche. That will be awesome.

We decided to make rice and sauce for dinner with our standard pasta sauce (we were too snobby to make pasta since we had made pasta when I was at his site last Sunday) which consists of olive oil, onions, garlic, tomatoes, tomato paste and fresh piment. It’s tasty.

We stayed up until like 1am listening to music and chatting. He left this morning about 9am, hope he made it back to his site ok! There’s no way for him to inform me if he got home ok other than sending a bush note which would take a day or two to arrive. So here’s hoping!

After he left I went to my reseau spot (about 20 min away by bike) to try and reach John to make sure he was going to be at his site this weekend but his phone was off. So I sent him a text message telling him I was coming and if he has decided to leave town I will just buy a place in a returning taxi right away before I do my shopping so I’m guaranteed to get home the same day. I have a whole list of stuff to buy.