Happy 5 months in country everyone!

HELLO TO RAEBECCA AND FAMILY! I'm sending you a letter but it's gonna take a little while to get there.

African Grey Hornbills are like Zazu from The Lion King but in grayscale. They remind me of Toucans but slimmer. They swoop around in flocks here in fields where there are interspersed trees, which is pretty much most of what you’ll find here. When they vocalize they sound exactly like a squeaky playground swing, and they sure are loud. I don’t know if it’s something about this particular swing but when I hear them I automatically think of the swings on the beach on Mason’s Island – so much so that when I hear the Hornbills I am almost surprised not to hear seagulls and waves.

This is my favorite hut in Bagre so far. I bike past it everyday to get to school and it's there all by itself in a huge field. Sometimes there's a bike outside. This is much the style of most of the huts here. The other style is simple mud walls. One day when I can speak Bissa or Moore I'll go over and see who lives there. If we could make postcards of our villages, this would be the picture i put on mine.

Nassara! Vous avez maigri! Faut bien manger! is what hear in various forms or another, I’m losing weight – and I should eat better. The pudgy American form here is seen as very healthy and attractive and so what I am becoming is not an improvement to them. Nutrition aside – I know that I am in fact healthier – just by virtue of the fact that I exercise daily – no exceptions, I’m starting to listen to my body more when it asks for nutrition. Like someone gave me a smoked fish today and normally I would have needed to pick out the muscle and leave the rest to have found it appetizing but now everything goes down except the bones.

The rains are gone for good now, and in their place has come extremely dry air, a bit cooler, and a good strong wind. The wind kicks up about midday and blows almost constantly. I no longer have beads of sweat all over me since it all evaporates so fast. The salt on my skin tells me I’m still sweating like a pig though. You know that amazing feeling you get when you pop open a cold soda or whatever your beverage of choice is and start to take those first few glups on a really hot day when you’ve been out working or playing and you swear that what you’re drinking is the single best thing on the planet? Well, that’s a feeling I get pretty much everyday with room temperature water. I wish I had a place on my body – maybe on my foot or something – that I could just run water into so that I could have enough water all day without constantly being attached at the hip to my Nalgene.

And my nosebleeds are back. I’m really going to have to be diligent about putting saline solution or gel up my nose because having to bike a half hour in dry wind is not going to do my nose any favors. I’m back to about one nosebleed a day. With saline it should get better. My iron intake is low to begin with – I don’t need to be losing more for no reason.

Because of the dam and the reservoir, the mosquitoes haven’t left with the rains. Either way though I think that I’ve conditioned myself to feel itchy in places below the knee at around 8 pm every night regardless of whether I’ve gotten any bites or not. I’ve learned the limits of what’s ok to scratch and what’s not ok to scratch though. I’ve learned that you can just plain scratch through your skin if you do it long enough - even if you don’t use or have any nails to do it with.

A couple weeks ago I came home from working at Steven’s office and it was late – about midnight – which is to say that no one was awake at all in my area. The moon was full and I could see just about everything, and I moved to my door, took out my keys and started to open my extremely loud lock when I heard a loud hissing that could be nothing other than a snake. I looked down, and there it was – about a foot from my feet and reared up. My first thought was: Someone put a snake on my porch – since only days earlier all the weeds and grass and anything plantlike had been bulldozed away everywhere around the school grounds for this vary reason – to get rid of snakes. My neighbor, Moussa, had told me even just the day before not to worry because there were no snakes here. Well this was a snake believe it or not. I ran to the car where Steven was waiting because I didn’t have a light on me to see very well and while the full moon was bright it wasn’t good enough. “There’s a snake on my porch!” I told him – but he didn’t catch it. “Il y a un serpent sur ma terrace!” – I tried in French but this was no better. “Just give me a flashlight!” I said and by this time he’d gotten the English and I now saw that he was much more scared of snakes than I. I ran back to the porch, relieved to see the snake hadn’t moved, and of course by now my puppy, who usually makes herself scarce when I’m away, had come to see what was up. I grabbed her and threw her in the kitchen and then grabbed her water bowl, threw out the water, and trapped the snake under the bowl. I put a large rock on the bowl and told Steven I was going to sleep now.

The next morning I woke to find a dead pigeon in the yard and the bowl still where it was. I think the pigeon died of a sickness completely unrelated to the snake since in fact several of my other pigeons have since died the same way. I went to the neighbor’s, and within minutes men with big sticks came and killed the snake. That week following we found three more snakes in and around my neighbors yard. Now it makes sense to me why they’re there: as the weather cools off and gets drier, it really cools down at night and for a snake, my cement porch which has been baking in the sun all day is certainly a more attractive place to be if you’re cold blooded than in the dirt. But since then everyone talks about how brave the nassara was to trap the snake like that. Call me crazy but, in my opinion it’s always better to know where a snake is than where it isn’t.

Life is really picking up here. Tests to give, tests to grade, lessons to plan, lessons to give, places to bike, people to greet, food to find, local languages to learn. I learned the other day that originally i was meant to be placed on the other side of Bagre - in the traditional Bissa village. But they couldn't find a suitable house for me, so that is how i ended up in the nice new houses across town and why I have to bike every day. Living there would have been a different bag of worms. Bissa bissa bissa and little else.

But I can see how time's gonna fly here. It's starting already. But i'm fine - Turtle's fine - and I hope everyone's enjoying the cooler weather of November back at home. I'm jealous.