Sigh

Today was another semi-interesting day. Alusine called in to say that he had seen the hippo near one of the traps, and he had sort of shoo-ed it onto the land into the forest. We decided to head up river and try to see if we could find the hippo. We went up in the boat and Michele and Alusine went into the very thick area of the forest to try to track the movements of the hippo. They heard it walking around but couldn’t see it. The rest of us stationed ourselves all up and down the river to try to block off any of the exits the hippo might try to take into the water. It was disappointing to hear that they couldn’t find it, and we headed back to camp a little desolate. Michele is actually going to head up river with Alusine tomorrow in case the hippo makes an appearance again, and I get to continue to be the coordinator from the other side, trying to get people to come together and am the communications hub. She gets the more interesting part but hey, whatever gets us a hippo.

Yesterday somebody died – Jami’s (Kenewa’s wife) grandmother, and Bockary’s birth mother. Since she was so closely related to people, we had to let the guys have the day off to go arrange the burial. I went to town because it was my hope to go to Potoru with Minah. Of course he was drafted as the person who was the book keeper for all the contributions for the funeral, so our journey got delayed and delayed some more. After the trap checks in the evening we finally got going. When we reached Potoru, I had time to get some “ataya” (strong sweet tea) before the skies opened up and the streets became a river of mud. I ran across the street to the acheke place for some food that was not rice. Acheke is ground up, slightly fermented cassava, and in Potoru it comes topped with raw onion (small, please!), fish, mayonnaise, greasy noodles, sweet potatoes and ketchup – if you’re really lucky, they will have plantains, boiled eggs, and cucumber, but alas I was not lucky that night. It was late when we got home and I tumbled into bed, exhausted! I was definitely not used to riding on a motorcycle.