Desert Gills

  This is a cute photo from August that we were going to post at that time, but never did because of various internet issues. Ir on the way to New York City - JFK airport - in our final franctic day. I like it because it illustrates the ridiculousness of the '14 checked bags plus carry-ons that we tried to cram into one car' story.

  This is our town from the air. It does inspire me even just to walk through town and to see the living conditions. People are actually better in our town around the hospital than in other parts of the country, what with the flow of capital coming in, and there is electricity connected in most places... but still, houses are made mostly out of mud/adobe, and water is typically brought by donkey cart from the well. A lot of time is spent on food-preparation... the women typically have callouses on their thumbs from hand-grinding the staple millet into grain. The mortar and pestle may make for some pastoral landscape art, but using them is hard work!

  One adjustment to living here is the critters. Lizards are as endemic as squirrels here. Actually, more so... our short-term surgeon said that he counted 37 recently on his three minute walk to work. Most look pretty similar but not quite as cool as this pictured chameleon... a couple minutes before he turned an angry black! Not as fun are the bugs. There probably are not more insects here than the states, but they are more often found in our house. I am glad to be married to an entomologist's daughter, because T fares pretty well with them... except for the cockroaches. These make us all a little uncomfortable. Ir and E have become excitable spotters, and I get to be the designated swatter. Unfortunately, our fly-swatter does not quite get the job done... I am searching for a suitable alternative after breaking the dustpan. T's naturalist family roots come through in a lot of healthy ways... two recent acquisitions were "Birds of West Africa" and "Rept...

Oh he was loving it I assure you.

  Ir and I recently watched Kung Fu Panda with a bunch of kids here. It was actually a little too scary for her. But it did make an impression... Saturday she brought a little stuffed Panda Bear to me and said "Dad, this is the bear that goes 'shooochooo, shooochoo, shooochooo, shoooochooo'" with appropriate flailing motions as you can imagine. Yeserday we watched some footage from India. Ir asked where it was from. I said, "a place called India... its different from America and Africa." She watched for a minute and then said, "It looks more like Africa." Very true.

  Ir often likes to give E what she calls 'taxi rides' on her trike. So we were delighted when we recently had Ad's niece over, and Ir quickly offered her a seat.

This past week brought us some frustrations. Someone sneaked onto the compound and stole half of our cloth Fuzzi Bunz Diapers which we had left up on the line overnight. The nationals do not use diapers: they do a sort of infant 'potty training' which does involve some genuine 'training' but also a fair amount of [throat clearing] 'potty'... lets just say I have already had a number of opportunities to become intimately familiar with some aspects of this local practice. There was one silver lining as our next door neighbors quickly heard about our plight and offered to lend us their diapers, as their two year old just potty-trained (I mean western style). So that was a partial relief... A second frustration has been our freezer. It broke again, and since it was still under warranty, the store in Niamey agreed to replace it. Only after going through all the transport hassles (with big assists from friends) did the store tell us that they would not replace i...