I think I have said this before but I will say it again – at least life is never dull around here. Good or bad, it is always interesting. All the cameras are out on the island and we will soon have to take them down again. I have started travelling to other places to make my introductions so that I can go spend time in places to see about their pygmy hippos. More on that later.
In concession to having my men not fast during Ramadan, I agreed to fast for one day with them on a Friday. Today is that Friday! It is 9am and I am already thirsty! I think maybe it’s just thinking about being thirsty that is making me thirsty. I drank like over a liter of water this morning. Apparently to properly fast I have to go to the mosque to pray, and since everybody seemed thrilled with this idea, I said sure why not. My best friend Jami (Kenewa’s girlfriend/wife) took me to the mosque since she is fasting too. I followed her moves. Don’t worry anybody, I’m only going to be Muslim for a day! No offense to the religion, but it’s definitely not for me! There was definitely some giggling from the old ladies inside the mosque during some of the prayer (which is a no-no, but I must have looked pretty funny anyways). I think I’m too American for Islam (i.e. women sitting behind a wall behind the men during prayer kind of sticks in my craw so to speak).
Wednesday I went to Serabu with Kenewa, Bockary and Mediwa (the village youth leader). Serabu is the village at the “entrance” of the South Kambui Hills reserve. I want to stay there awhile and look around for pygmy hippos since this place really hasn’t been explored for them before. However, the 7 mile road between Kambama and Serabu is HORRIBLE. Everybody told us it as but we were determined. Kenewa rode my red motorcycle and I took my beautiful black motorcycle. It took us almost 2 hours to get there. I slipped in a swamp area (the water came up to our knees) and fell over with Bockary on the back. I only got a few scratches and we weren’t going very fast. In fact most of the way I was in 1st gear! We might have made it faster if we had walked. One of the “bridges” was just some felled palm trees over a river. The trunks were all different sizes and the river was nearly running over the bridge.
The people of Serabu were very welcoming, especially with the help of my letter from the Ministry of Forestry and my field assistants. They told me they had lots of pygmy hippos and described some of the feeding sites which were consistent with what I know about pygmy hippos. I will be going there in October hopefully to stay for a couple weeks. This village is gorgeous!! It was extremely well-off before the war but the rebels (even Foday Sankoh) had their bases in the Kambui Hills, so the village was destroyed. You can see leftover remnants of fancy houses. Still the village is beautiful with the hills surrounding it and a beautiful river with towering bamboo and mango and fruit trees everywhere. Very clean, calm – I’m pretty excited to go there and base out of there for awhile. There’s even a health clinic! Bockary even found himself a potential girlfriend.
The way back was much quicker since we knew the road and I was more comfortable with what my motorcycle was capable of as well as the weight of Bockary on the back (that man is heavy!! He’s small but has insane muscles!). I was kind of proud of myself and I can see how this motorcycle thing can be addictive. Though Bockary was an added difficulty on the bike (harder to balance with the weight of another person), he really helped me through some of the difficult parts of the road by cheering me on. Mediwa was on my bike first but before we even started he said he was afraid of me.
This week we had a wretched cook unfortunately. Some of you may know that I switch cooks every week between the Barri and Koya chiefdoms. It’s really annoying but makes the communities happy. This week’s cook I sent away early cuz I just couldn’t stand her anymore. Her voice is somewhere between a parrot and chicken, she has a toddler who cries anytime she leaves him anywhere (which she does all the time), and the toddler poops wherever he pleases (i.e. on my kitchen floor). As if all this is not enough, she was a horrible cook. Every one of her sauces tasted the same even though she had different ingredients. Even the trap diggers I had working for me said she didn’t know how to cook. So those factors combined made me tell her to go away and never return! Well I think I did it nicer than that at least…The man who chose her as a cook was fined.
------
The fast day hasn’t been too horrible. It’s 4pm and I feel about the same as I did at 9am. Then again I’ve been sleeping since 1pm! Mostly so I could get out of the 2pm and 4pm prayers. People know I hate being woken up so they never did it. YAY! Praying in Niger was a lot more fun – it was out in the open when I did it and somehow seemed less somber. The mosque is hot, the ground is rocky and there is a waist-high wall in between the women and the men. Very depressing! I’ll do the 7pm prayer just to finish off the day but really one day was way more than enough for me thank you very much.
To keep my mind off water, I bathed two kittens that are in the village. They were white at one point and now they are grayish black from cooking ashes and who knows what, and flea-ridden to boot. So we got some soap and water and bathed the suckers. They actually behaved very well considering. Then there is this stuff called Blue that they use as both a detergent and as something to get rid of pests on their goats, so we put it on there to see if it would help with the fleas. And voila – Blue cats! At least it was an amusing diversion for the day. Everybody thought I was pretty crazy for wanting to wash cats. However, one of my friends said we should do it every Friday, and the owner of the cats offered me one to keep. Wish I could - at least it would keep the rats running in the kitchen on Tiwai!!
No comments:
Post a Comment