Return to Reality

Well I'm back in Burkina after taking a much needed (and heavenly!) vacation to the US. I left right before the rains started and returned to green plants, water and humidity. My moringa trees virtually exploded in size, mushrooms are growing in my courtyard, the roof to my house leaks with northerly storms and the mango season is over (dang it).

My beautiful three moringas (left) in my courtyard.

mushrooms

My neighbors chickens roosting for the night.

I've had all manor of critters to distract and welcome me. The most exciting was discovering I had a mouse in my house one night. Keeping a long story short, the following day, after a thorough cleaning of every inch of the house, I found the mouse in my mosquito screen window box. I closed the window to keep him from going back inside, cut a hole in the screen and chased him out.

The gray little mouse.

escape hole

screen repair

Other members of my welcome committee have included: scorpion #19 carrying a cockroach in it's pincer, bizarre beetles, a millipede, a hedgehog, a tree full of mocking blue colored birds and an endless sky full of bats in Ouaga.

baby hedgehog

the tiny specks in the sky are bats

bats

At them moment I'm in Ouaga for MSC (mid service conference). Hard to believe I've been here a little over a year! One year left to go... School starts in October, so until then it's doing little things to stay busy and sane. It looks like I will have the same classes as last year, thank goodness! Hopefully this year I'll have more time to work on making my lesson plans better, rather than just trying to cover the curriculum.