Random Post

You know how sometimes you wake-up from a particularly peaceful afternoon nap with your heart racing because you think it's the next morning and that you've over slept? Thank goodness the panic subsides after checking the clock, but that brief period in between is truly frightening!

It’s time to link together random thoughts, events and pretty pictures in order to make one cohesive blog post. I'll start with the most difficult/frustrating and end with the pretty pictures.

• Last week I gave a test in my math class. Not a remarkable event really, except that this time I caught 13 cases of cheating and therefore gave out 13 zeros! For the most part the cheating consisted of students copying the answers from their neighbors. It was easily detected by numbering the tests according to who sat next to whom. The cheating was fairly obvious if two people made the same error and they were sitting next to each other. We'll see what happens next time. Hopefully I scared them!

Random pictures of a cute little red bird.

• It was hot again last week, but luckily the Harmattan blew again and cooled things off. If that was a preview of the hot season I'm a little scared! It's amazing how much of a luxury an air conditioner truly is and how many people on this planet don't have them.
  Methods to cool off during the hot season (so I've heard) include not leaving the shade during the hot part of the day, soaking a pagne (basically a sheet) in water and wrapping it around you, living under a fan etc. I'm positive I'll have more details on hot weather survival techniques in the near future.
• Luckily I just received another weapon in the arsenal against overheating ... indoor plumbing! I now have both a functioning shower and a sink in my bathroom.
• Yesterday I made an attempt at papaya appreciation. To be honest I hate papayas, but I thought maybe there was a chance that I hadn't ever had a good papaya since there are no papaya trees in the western US. So I bought one, cut it, scooped out the fish egg looking seeds and tasted. It's official, papayas are horrible!! I think their problem is that they really do taste fishy. yuk. On the upside, I've heard papaya trees grow fast, so I popped the gelatinous sac surrounding a handful of the seeds in a twisted attempt to grow them.

papaya

Scary papaya seeds

• Riding a bike through a herd of cows, sheep and goats is sometimes the highlight of my day.
• In the run up to coming here whenever I would tell someone that I was going to Burkina Faso they would invariably respond "where's that?". There were two occasions however where the other person actually knew that Burkina was a country in West Africa. What's bizarre though is that both persons commented on how great the strawberries were in Ouagadougou. Strawberries? Well I can now confirm that strawberries really do exist in Ouaga (cold season only) and boy do they taste good!

• Plant update: 2 out of the 5 "flowers" that I planted died, my benga (bean) bush is prolifically producing thanks to Edward and my strange desert plant is thriving with very pretty flowers.

Edward

Praying mantis on benga bush

bizarre desert plant