My dog is actually a girl

*BEFORE I START BLABBING I WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE CARE PACKAGES AND PHONECALLS AND THE LETTERS AND EMAILS AND COMMENTS FROM YOU ALL - NO JOKE, IT REALLY KEEPS ME GOING - YOU GUYS ROCK*

So I can sex flies, snakes, crabs, fish and you'd think most mammals. But! By puppy is actually a girl. There was some know-it-all-teenager hanging around my gate and so I went out with the puppy and he looked at it and asked what it was. I assumed "a dog" was not the answer he was looking for, so I said "a boy" and he doubled over laughing. I picked the pup right up and put it's underside in his face and said "a boy" and he said "no that's a girl, nassara". Then he called over about 10 people from the road and they all confirmed: paaga, female. In my defense, a young puppies genitals are pretty strange. I'd asked for a boy and when I got the pup I thought it looked pretty strange for a boy but it looked even stranger to be a girl so I let it go. No, he's a she. So I changed her name. Now she's called Turtle, after the character in Barabara Kinsolver's book The Bean Trees. I also just like turtles. And they are good luck here. Just about every morning she goes out and plays with a herd of donkeys that come through. She loves jumping up on their faces. They're as calm as can be. She probably feels like they're playing back as they dodge her to try to get to the grass.

But now I need to figure out how to not let her have babies. She's still young, maybe three months now, so I've got some time till she needs to be spayed. I spent some time using by best Googling skills to see if anyone had tried this before and had written about it. The best thing I came up with was a woman who had spend 9 years in Ouagadougou and had gotten her cat spayed with success. Unfortunately for me, how she succeeded was by colaborating with friends and flying up a legit vet from Ghana to spay the cat in a hotel room. Cat's fine; I just need an option in Burkina. She was so nice though and told me about a vet that treats domestic animals in Ouagadougou and that despite the fact that the vet is said to be on the up and up, she had a friend who got a cat spayed by her and the cat died during the operation. I don't really understand how unless it was something about the cat that it could die during a spay operation if the vet was on the up and up. But it seems like the best option I have. Having a dog here is kind of different anyway. You have her and you love her and you also understand that between snakes and people that would happily have her for dinner, her life is really just a stretch of good luck. So I'll take a chance on that vet. Other than that, the local vet in Bagré should come over next week and give her her vaccines. I heard the price is 1000 CFA; that's 2 dollars. She's doing well though; she's gone from a clumsy dopey puppy to a very high energy puppy on legs and paws that look to big for her.

I read an amazing book this week. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. If you're not willing to come visit me but you still want to get a good idea about life in rural Africa you should pick up this book. It's fiction, but in so many ways it's not. I kind of feel like Barabara Kingsolver must have been spying on my life here for a while before she sat down and wrote about the culture and people. It's kind of creepy. Like, how does she know that? Aside from all that it's regarded as a damn good book.

The rains are slowing down here now. Instead of raining most days, it just threatens to rain. Makes a big fuss, gusts wind, picks up dust, slams all my doors and blows around the birds but then just quiets down instead of pouring. Here's a picture of the last good rain coming in. I would like you to notice the cows on my future neighbor's front steps. They say that it'll all stop within a couple weeks now and then the grasses will die and they'll burn them all up around the school yard so that people can walk around easier and there won't be any snakes in the grass. The next picture is literally of thirty seconds later and the total drop in visibility when it pours like that. I wonder, are there any clouds during the dry season? What will it really be like to live here when I won't see rain again till next year?

La rentrée scholaire is tomorrow, the day school is supposed to start. But school doesn't really start then and I don't really know when it will. I'll show up tomorrow and hopefully will find out my schedule and then we'll talk about when school can start. It's all based around the harvest and when the teachers are getting to town. School can be very important to people but in the end for subsistence farmers, the harvest will always be more important and one of the most valuable things about having kids is that they can help work around the house and the fields. So if you say school will start tomorrow then no one will show up. In the end starting school late just makes sense. I've started getting a little nervous about teaching. Without a schedule or a starting date it's hard to get nervous about anything but that but I think that preparing for 4 different classes on 4 different things each week is going to be a challenge.

I met a Tiawanese man this week. He works in Bagré along with a few other Tiawanese agriculture engineers. They have a cooperative with Burkina and work on growing rice in Bagré. He took me out in his air conditioned truck and showed me the rice fields. Bagré is enormous. I had no idea. Not in people but in fields. We drove for miles and miles and he showed me the bridges that carry water to fields like they do in Taiwan, he said. He showed me other work they are doing with showing the Burkinabé how to farm fish. We went down to the fish pools and there were just dozens of black kites (see bird page) hanging around picking off fish just a few feet from me. He also took me to his office and let me use the internet for a few minutes. That's right: the internet. In Bagré. At times like this I feel very confused. Simultaneously in a village that is mostly mud huts and tradition you can find AC and the internet. He wants me to teach him French. I don't know how I feel about that. Meeting him was great and it's comforting to know that there is the net close by if I really need it but I also felt kind of appreciative of how I am living here. Living poor is what I mean. The man was doing great things for Bagré but he was not integrating at all. I have no electricity or running water but my porch is full of company every night. But it wasn't part of what he was here for. I felt a little sad that I hadn't elected to go see the rice fields with Daniel on our bikes instead of inside the bubble of a truck.

Well until next time; and that next time might be from Bagré.