Hallelujah!

Where there are clouds, soon will there be rain! In fact, it has rained a couple times in the last week and it's fantastic. All of the farmers are rushing to their fields to start seeding their millet. This could be the start of the rainy season (and end of the HOT season)! Yahoo!

All is well here. We are cuurently enjoying the peak of the mango season. They grow mangoes like we grow apples. They are everwhere. And they're dirt cheap. Sonia bought seven the other day for the equivalent of $.06 US. The only problem is that they are kind of messy to eat. But that's not stopping us.

Not much else to report. Just busy gearing up for our various community projects on the horizon.

Oh, and we wanted to share a picture of our little friend Delphiné, the daughter of our closest neighbor. She comes to greet us every morning before she gets all dirty (which only takes a matter of minutes). When we first arrived she screamed every time she saw us (something quite common here). But now we're ol' buddies. And despite the competition, she is starting to warm up to Sonia. She's too cute...

Cinco de Mayo and about 10,000km from a margarita

It's now May and the heat is still going full force. But now we are starting to have electrical storms at night complete with thunder, lighting and even a little RAIN! With such weather, we have had a little problem with bugs. Namely termites and the creepy crawlies that termites attrack. Ever heard of a chauffeur de scorpions? We hadn't either. Kind of looks like a large hairy spider, but with 10 legs, not 8. It supposedly transports scorpions on it's back from time to time. Couldn't find any info online and we were too tramatized to shoot a photo. Well a couple nights ago, we killed four in the stretch of about an hour (ok, we didn't kill them, we commission our 14 year old host brother to lay the smack down). And the same night, we had another large scorpion (did shoot a photo of him) and the largest spider we had seen to-date. Needless to say, Sonia was not pleased.



Otherwise, we had our giant "Journée de Réflexion et d'Echange" last weekend. It is a big community-based Ag State Fair kind of thing with prizes for the biggest oinion, nicest goat, etc. I led up the cow auction where we sold lottery-style tickets for 500cfa (about $1) and pulled one winner who took home a big beef worth 60,000cfa (about $120)! He was happy, all of the losers were not. That's life my friends.

On a happy note, for whatever reason, Sonia got inspired to play beauty salon yesterday, and I was the subject. The day started with a hair cut and ended with my first-ever pedicure (while sipping what I call an African Hefeweizen... dolo with a little honey and lemon). The photos say it all!



I think that's all from here. Continue to stay classy.