Here N There

My month started with a trek across the country. Since then life has been less dramatic but certainly busy. After three weeks of living less than 2 miles from the beach, I finally got there! It's more complicated than you might think, especially when there is lots of traffic. A&C took L and I there for a very relaxing afternoon in the sand and sun. The water was pretty cold but we splashed around some anyway, then retreated to the sand to toss a frisbee around. Then we wandered up and down the shore looking for strange creatures and cool shells. Here are some pictures.

Side note: I am trying to figure out what screen color mode to use for photo editing. These first ones were "fixed" in a normal LCD mode. Normally I edit photos with my screen on a photo setting (as is the case with the last two). So tell me which ones look better on your screen and which ones look either washed out or too dark. Okay, enough about all that. I present to you, the beach!

 Though you can't see any in this picture, there were a lot of large ships just off shore. It was kind of a weird experience. It was like Duluth times 50. We had binoculars along and I spent some time just studying them. This little lagoon and the nearby rocks housed some interesting critters.

 Here is one of the strange little things that we found. Isn't it a sea anemone? Or however you spell that? I don't know. It looked cool, though!

 And here is another... thing. Creature? Mold? It looks like retro spaghetti. There was this other stuff too that was mixed in with the seaweed. It was green and transparent and had the consistency of rubber. It was in long stringy tubers, so I think it was a plant. We threw it at each other.

Then there was this spikey little dude. He was kind of dehydrated.

I don't know what kind of creature lived here, but this shell could tell an interesting tale. There were a lot of pretty shells on the beach but there were also some really ugly ones like this that had massive gouges and pits and chips. It makes me wonder what kind of life the creature lived, what kinds of perils he survived through. I'm guessing he didn't just sit on the floor of the ocean all day, looking pretty. To get scars like that he must have been riding the waves and crashing against the rocks. And I bet he was loving it!

Yay, I finally got to sit under a palm tree! It feels so exotic! Oh, and I have since learned that banana trees (which this isn't) aren't trees at all. They are plants. They spring up each year from a shoot, grow to full height, produce bananas, and then die and fall over. Crazy! They are so tall, and God makes them do that every year. And I thought that plants didn't grow well in sand...

My assorted friends who went to the beach.

*okay, now the pictures change to photo mode*

I didn't go swimming with him, but he did kind of hang around while we were under the palm tree. I'm sure he was hoping to join us for snacks, but we didn't invite him.

Okay, enough with the fun stuff. Last weekend was serious. Really. It was the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It's such a sober event, some of the teams dress up like Star Wars characters and pixies. Fortunately for you, I didn't get any good pictures of them. Darth Vader in a speedo is not something you can see without lifelong scars. A lot of my coworkers had kids in the tournament (or where playing themselves) so I spent the afternoon watching and cheering them on.

The other major event that has marked the month is the arrival of my roommate. He got here about a week ago and I had to re-adjust to living in my apartment. It is tough combining two different schedules and sharing everything. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, the one frying pan and the two precious electrical outlets... If we want to plug in a fan, we have to unplug a computer. My desk doubles as the kitchen table, which does horrors for my already-weak organizational skills. We also had only one key for a while, with the result that I frequently got locked out. But it's better now. We got a second key, we've decided that sleep is overrated, we may be getting a power strip soon to deal with that dilemma, and we are getting along well. We both need to get better at spending time with God, though, so please pray that we each figure out when, how, and where to do that.

He is German and once in a while I make him speak German so I can try to remember some of what Frau Gibson tried to teach me ten years ago. I don't usually catch much. So we carry on many good conversations in English. We sing together too. There was an old guitar in the conference room that was missing a string, so I got new strings and re-strung it Thursday night. Now we both play it, tune it, play it, tune it... I have decided that living alone is easier but not necessarily better. It has been helpful for me also to suddenly be the experienced guy rather than the new guy. Whether I actually know what I'm doing or not, my room mate assumes that I do!

Africa from the back seat

I was really nervous as we were about to leave for this 4-day adventure in the wilder parts of the country. I had just spent the last 2 days creating a personal contingency plan and therefore had all kinds of fun scenarios running through my head. Kidnapping, bombs, venomous snakes... Several coworkers came out to the truck to see us off, which in my mind emphasized the possibility that I could be in for more adventure than I had bargained for. I prayed that God would give me some peace, and as I looked past the two other people wedged into the back seat at the waving hands on the other side of the dirty window, it suddenly struck me that my present situation was not a whole lot different than being strapped into the space shuttle and waving good-bye to the support crew just before being blasted into an empty void from which you may or may not return. And I loved that idea.

The space analogies did not end there. As we were driving one of my coworkers told me that we were about to see Cape Canaveral. Sure enough, this interesting-looking mosque soon came into view.

From there we went from human space flight to science fiction. The roads were incredible, though my friends assured me that they used to be ten times worse. Imagine, first of all, that the one major road crossing the entire country is a narrow 2 lane affair (one lane each direction) with a gravel shoulder dropped down 2 inches that is half a car wide. Everything uses this road. Massive overloaded rice trucks with bad suspension, bush taxis, donkey carts, people on foot, livestock (and they never go with traffic), and lots of mopeds that serve as taxis between towns. Now imagine that this road is built on sand and therefore full of sinkholes that sometimes reach 3/4 of the way across the road, forcing all traffic in both direction to filter through the same narrow patch of tar.

And finally, imagine that all of the people on the road, despite a normally calm lifestyle, are in the most indescribably all-fired hurry to reach their destination as soon as they are behind the wheel (or handlebars, as the case me be). The livestock and pedestrians, on the other hand, tend to walk wherever they want with minimal regard to what is going on around them.

How, you ask, does this relate to science fiction? The only suitable analogy I could come up with, as I sat cringing in the back seat, was the podracing sequence from Star Wars episode 1. Speeding along and swerving at the last moment, dodging lumbering trucks and dawdling donkeys, slamming on the breaks when an unavoidable gouge opened up before us... good thing our driver had jedi skills.

The further we got from the city the more I enjoyed the views. I was pleased do discover that there really is green in this country- a lot of it, actually. They also have these really bizarre trees called Baobobs. I didn't get any pictures of the really weird ones, but this will do.

The legend says that the angel Michael got mad at them for some reason, uprooted them, and planted them all upside-down. It does rather look like it! They especially look odd when they have leaves because all the leaves are in little clusters and the tree looks otherwise bare.

I also got some great blurry shots through the dirty side window. These guys are stacking either rice or salt. Whichever it is, those bags look heavy!

And I got even more messy shots through the windshield. Isn't it amazing how the ladies can just walk along for miles with stuff on their heads?

We spent the first evening with a neat American family and got on our way early the next morning. On the way south we stopped at a number of small towns, especially ones that had radio stations. Here is the first radio station we visited.

This guy is really neat. He is one of the DJs at the radio station (can you tell?) and he also sees himself as a mentor for the young people in town.

We also visited individuals and families in several places. I don't remember who all they were or what they did, but most of them were local leaders of one sort or another. They all welcomed us graciously and I really enjoyed seeing their houses.

Here is another radio station we visited.

And this was probably the smallest village we visited that day. It was our last stop before heading to the campment.

I took this picture as we were leaving. We saw a lot of great sunrises and sunsets on the trip.

This is the campment we stayed at

And this was the view in the morning!

The next morning we headed out to a village for a Sunday morning service. There were a good number of people packed into the clay building!

When I showed her this picture she didn't comment. Obviously she is not effected by her own cuteness.

Here are the pros at work on the millet. It is like a mortar and pestle, but much bigger. One of my coworkers tried it and gave up after about three jabs.

Abraham's servant found a wife at the well. That didn't happen for me, but I did get a blurry picture!

Country roads, take me home... out there the roads between villages are a lot like our field roads.

We spent our Sunday afternoon eating, talking, and drinking tea. It was nice and relaxing!

Hi kids!

I love these yellow and red leaves.

I have started a collection of miss-spelled English. Since most people here don't speak English, it doesn't really matter. English is just cool because it is English. French, on the other hand, is almost always correct because the people actually know what it says.

At yet another radio station they were burning off the tall grass nearby. As we waited to talk to the workers there I noticed the smoke filtering through the trees.

My last sunrise in the south!

At first this river is huge. By this point it is much smaller.

We saw monkeys! Unfortunately I took too long to roll down my window and all I got is this guy's backside.

Nearly all of the trucks here are yellow. I asked why and nobody knows. They told me maybe the yellow paint is cheaper. I could probably find out if I went on the Renault website. When I was in France I didn't give a whole lot of credit to French car manufacturers, but now that I have seen the massive number of French vehicles from the 80s or earlier that are still running here, I have to be impressed.

And I praise God that he kept our vehicle running, especially when we were on the road after sunset! He even opened the door for us when we locked the keys inside. I punched the passenger door once and it popped open, even though a coworker had just tried the same thing several times. Otherwise we would have had to break either a lock or a window. We didn't even have a wire coat hanger.

And there were many other little adventures, but I don't have time to tell them all now.