Mold take 2, Bring in the Macaroni

Ok, no, there is no moldy macaroni. So I am not good at titleing.

And also, reading through that last entry. I am not really as good a writer as I like to pretend I am. At the least I need to go back and fix the typing errors that I still blame on the french keyboard. -This one right now has especially sticky keys to make it even more fun to use. Ghaa! stupid shift-period!

Ok, so where was I, oh yeah, so trying to pull myself together from terrible day. Eventually it did stop raining and my pants at least dried as I wore them. Eventually night fell and one of my other shirts I had hanging up in my room was dry enough to put on for the evening. I sat with my family while they broke the fast, they asked concerend questions and neighbors shook their head and gave the usual 'the rainy season is very hard'. I slept on a mat on the floor that night, it was hot and humid enough anyway not to want to sleep on a matress even if they wernt so wet and piled with papers.

Anyway, so the next couple days were more of just getting things fixed and getting things dry. I put everything back out again the next morning, cemented part of the floor, gave all my clothes bed sheets and my sister (keeping pants I was wearing and two shirts, one with a huge tear in the back). I cleaned up everything as best I could, the cameras seem rather deceased though. Then over the next couple days I went to reasembling everything better than it was. I hung up my bags and sleeping bag. put the trunks up on tin can legs, put the surviving three boxes with semi drying papers up on cans too under the bed. I fixed up my water filter in a nex brick stand and threw out everything that looked gross or i realized was not important enough to keep.

It was rather inconvenient not having clothes or sheets for several days, It involved a lot of sleeping on a bare cot and probably not looking so great. But then I didnt really go out much except to hang out with the men in the village center. I was fasting with them again and didnt really have the energy to do much else.

A couple days after my cleanup began we had a hard rain that didnt last long but dumped a lot of water. When I went out in the afternoon I noticed all the men from the neighboring compounds were all gathered over near the boutique. There was a well there that hadnt been used in a while but, low bricked with crumbling cement. In three-quarters of the way around the ground had split and sunk a couple inches in a neat circle a couple feet out from the well walls. The men were tsking about how much rain there has been this year, something I thought was generally a good thing, but they were saying how full all the wells are and how they hoped that none of the other ones fell in. then with poles they pushed in the top bricks as best they could then filled the full well, it had water maybe two meters down, with dirt and rocks so no one would fall in it and it wouldnt collapse anymore.

Anyway, so then there was Korite. Korite is the day after Ramadan is over, when the moon has been spotted again and people, instead of sitting around all day not doing anything, we all sit around and eat and drink water and eat some more. The moon was spotted a night earlier in my area than people expected to see it. Some villages kept fasting for a day and I, since no one had told me different the night before, woke up all early and had breakfast and went back to bed, only to get up to everyone else having breakfast. Not that that was terrible. My sister brought me a dozen begnets wrapped in a sheet of newspaper to snack on and when I went out into the village I had more cups of tea.... well, it was enough to make up for not having any for a month.

I remembered my family had chicked last year and so I was excited that we might have that again. Still sitting with people in the village center, girls started bringing bowl after bowl of lunch and set them for everyone in the neighborhood to eat. I was surprised to see we all were having cow meat with our macaroni and onion sauce and potato chunks . It wasnt bad and I actually was pleasantly full at the end and not wavering on mildly ill.

Dinner that night was just leftovers from dinner, but I was excited the next day to have millet again for dinner. We did indeed have chicken at my house and somehow those leftovers lasted a couple days after.

In the last throws of the rainy season, we have been having really hard rains and really hot nights, with the icing on the cake of tons of mosquitos. They should be on their way out soon though, when the rains end my area is not usually so buggy.