So, I was just trying to buy airplane tickets to fly to England for spring break, and thought to use Bing.com, having read an article about how they are trying to beat Google in certain types of searches as a way to get a toehold on greater market share. Really, they are competing with Kayak and other meta-flight search websites. And Bing's functionality seemed to be better, easily filterable and a pretty good interface. But, the first time I used it, the flight I wanted to buy was unavailable - and I had to search for it all over again once Bing referred me to Orbitz or wherever to make the purchase. How stupid is that? Bing has all the flight details, date, number of passengers, etc, but they refer me to the beginning of the search so I can put all that in again by hand? And then, when I do that, the flight doesn't exist? Crappy user experience, but something I can let slide if it happens once.

So, when I went back to look at flights again today, I gave Bing another shot. I should have thought: "fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, .... won't get fooled again" like our most recent former president. Same problems with flights not existing, after getting great prices for them from Bing. And they still aren't referring me to the actual location on websites where I can find that info, I have to put it all in again. So, I will be avoiding Bing like I do most Microsoft products, and for pretty much the same reasons - inferior quality with too much marketing shine.

So, the economy is cratering. And banks seem to be mostly to blame. This piece helped me understand a little more about credit default swaps, and why we keep sinking money into AIG. Also, Planet Money is a good, ongoing resource - and I found the above link here. I figure it's better to understand some of this, that way we can know if things ever start to look less bleak.

Yay!

Listening to Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama for president reminded me of why I felt so badly about how the Bush administration abused this national hero, and how I hope there will be a chance for him to redeem his record on the world stage.

In my opinion the most important part of what he said was about the suggestions that Obama is a Muslim:

"He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America," Powell said. "Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?"

How did our country, founded on the idea of religious freedom, come so far down this path of hatred and xenophobia? I had never thought the word Islamophobia before this weekend, but that's a symptom of our current sickness. Our country has big, serious problems, and we have allowed ourselves to be distracted from them with fear and selfishness. I could write about it for hours, but really I just wanted to express some small joy about what Colin Powell said, and hope that it doesn't slip past our collective attention as just another part of this far too long election process.

For a much better written essay on the same point, Abed Z. Bhuyan wrote one.

I know I haven't posted in a long time, and no one checks here anymore, but I found this essay valuable, and thought that I'd link to it. It talks about a part of the American democratic process that I also find disturbing.

The empire is at an end, may we please shift to being a good citizen without collapse and chaos?

Also, this is hilarious.

So I've been away from the blogging thing for a long while. Since coming back to the U.S, it hasn't really been on my "list of things to do". It's occasionally been on the "list of things I should do", but mostly on the "list of things to ignore". That list gets very long here at times.

To catch up with everything I've been doing, check out Sarah. She's been good, maybe because she's the one away from her home and I'm the one back in familiar places, feeling like everything I do is familiar to the point of contempt for anyone reading. But, I still feel like I should write about stuff.

This is the stuff I find interesting about my life now: issues in America. Our country has so many problems, so many things that make me abuse all around me with rants - and I think it's almost entirely because we could be doing so much better. I almost went all caps there for a moment.

I love the U.S. of A. I love the potential of this country. But I am enraged by so much of what goes on here, what passes for "normal".

Until next time,

Very good water filter bottle for cleaning any water. The British military already bought all of them.

Santiago de Compostela CathedralSomehow the visiting of foreign places makes the here and now a little more dull when I return, even if the "here and now" is itself foreign to me. I guess every place is less foreign when you return to it, perhaps by definition. In any case, I loved the food, the language, the lifestyle, the weather and most of all the people of Spain. Even packed into six days of zooming around.

We arrived in Santiago de Compostela a week ago today, less hard working than most of the pilgrims who visit this purported burial place of Saint James. I could never quite work out the name Santiago until Miguel broke it down for me - and gave a bit of a push to connect Iago with James. In any case, a stunning town/city full of history and beautiful architecture to go along with all the pilgrims. I would love to do one of the journeys - ideally from the Pyrenees, by bicycle - at some point. English people don't seem to visit the north of Spain nearly so much as the south, but I found it

wonderful, not so hot and full-to-bursting with great food. I'm not the first to "discover" it, but it was almost perfect enough to believe I was.

After that first day, we spent a couple of days exploring the Galician coastline both north and south of A Coruña, swimming at great beaches, eating ridiculously good food (my friend Polly would have called it repulsive, disgusting, or nauseating, it was so good), and generally enjoying ourselves too much. Over the weekend we went down to the area where Miguel's wife Rosa grew up, where her family still lives. It's beautiful seaside fishing and farming villages, framed by small but spectacular hills and filled with lovely Spanish people. I'm gushing so much I've used the hated expression "lovely" to describe someone. Thank heaven I'm returning to the US next week, my American vocabulary is nearly dead.

We spent a last day in town, seeing the sights and, one last time, eating an incapacitating amount of food, this time with Miguel's family at a little place they have in the hills above town. Some obscene amount of grilled meat(>3kg for seven people), all locally raised and organic so that the colon cancer will be slower. I love Spain.

p.s. Does anybody know of a way to link from the web to Google Earth? I wanted to give locations of the beaches and whatnot, but can't be bothered to play with it more than superficially. If not, can you contact Google and have them get on this? I mean, I figure they already have a ridiculous amount about me in those databases...

Red Screes to the East

Originally uploaded by zacshepherd I have just returned from another trip north to Lancaster, which included a few nights of partying with Sarah's friends and a few days of walking in the lakes. We also went walking a few times on a first trip, including the trip up Red Screes where I took this shot. I put a few more photos from England, plus some of the end of my time in Gambia up on the flickr site.

Besides going to Lancaster, I've been busy with odd projects, plus a bit of going around and meeting Sarah's people. We've managed to see a couple of friends from The Gambia, plus a lot of her family. We are staying in a tent in the garden of her sister Rachel's house. At least there is running water inside the house.

I've also been getting back into geek mode - I spent a bunch of time last week re-installing operating systems and getting broadband working at Rachel's, which makes it possible for me to geek out just that much more. Something tells me I should think about doing this professionally again, even if just to get restarted in our wonderful money economy.

I'm flying to the US on September 20th, so I hope to be able to catch up with people after that.

Here I am in Lancaster, enjoying the cold weather and rain - to be honest it's barely rained in three days, but I've seen plenty - and the wonderful variety of food. I miss many things about Gambia, and I know I will be for a long time, but one thing I am loving in particular is getting back in touch with the wonderful thing that broadband internet access is. Ah, to surf again.

And while I'm surfing, and generally catching up with the vast and varied media of our society, I've been paying attention to one of my favorite sporting events, the Tour de France. And, for the second year in a row, it's fallen badly under the shadow of doping, performance enhancers and generally unclean behavior. And while I hate that it's happening the way that it is, and can't wait for it to be a clean sport, I just saw an article that put it into perspective a bit. Jemele Hill writes about how American sports could never survive the scrutiny that professional cyclists undergo. I love the NFL, but...

The newest way I know I'm not in Africa anymore: I'm surfing both the internet and the t.v. channels at the same time. And I still have the attention span of a juvenile gnat.

Our Last Dinner Together

Originally uploaded by zacshepherd So now I'm in England, with broadband internet and reliable power. And I don't have a laptop to make use of it all. Soon enough, I suppose, I'll forget all about these problems and wish for the simplicity of the "good old days". Until then, I'm in an in-between, living-out-of-a-bag sort of life. But I'm okay with that.

My group got together one last time, and Sarah took a great picture. A whole gang of miscreants, missing a third of our number for one reason or another. I'll miss these guys, and those times. C'est la vie.

Tomorrow morning I leave for England. We are travelling overland to Dakar, departing first thing in the morning and then flying from there at eleven p.m.

I have a lot to write and pictures and it all, but life is just too crazy and the Peace Corps installed a new computer system that has screwed up all of my tools. So, a brief farewell post and then I hope to send updates from the UK.

It's been an amazing thing, this two year process. Life rolls along, change and hopefully learning happen. What else?

Love to everyone,

Zac

After all this time here, where in some ways life seems slower, it now completely feels to be rushing. Not that time hasn't flown by, but now things are changing and I need to be more active in choosing the direction of my own life again. As all of that dawns on me, how I have to go back to what I probably used to consider a normal amount of decision making, I also realize that my chances to look around this crazy place where I live are not for long, that opportunity is ending.

And, as I struggle to write, I understand that there are trade-offs for all these things. I miss reading the New York Times now. In four months or whenever, I will miss the endless greetings that are the start of every day in Fara Fenni. It's my favorite part of the day - the early time, before the heat is too oppresive, before everyone is fully awake and into their day. I even want to get up early so that I have plenty of time to take a couple of buckets to the water tap. I greet the women, some as they wait around the tap for their own buckets to have a chance to fill, some as they sweep the compound or do whatever they are busy doing. I also sweep my hut, and often clean my solar panel. Sometimes I carry water for the women, or do some washing if I have a few things. The most important part is just checking in with everyone, asking if they had a peaceful night, if they slept well. Questions that we might ask back home, but not of every person we saw in the morning. The simple routines, the daily beauty of this life, that's what I will miss the most.

I put up a few new pictures (from Amy's trip) on the flickr page. Hope everyone is well and having good adventures of their own...

Signs that I'm leaving here soon. Departure seems to be the big theme of my life, as I bid farewell to friends who have left just now (I think I've taken on some of the Gambian sense of time, meaning that "now" means the time from the recent past into the near future, with those recent and near adjectives being extremely flexible), and prepare for what's next.

And even though I'd have to deal with my yearly IRS burden if I weren't leaving, somehow it reminds me of the awful relative complexity of life in the US, as compared to this life here. And, all of my efforts of late have been down here in Kombo, which is not the simple thing that life in Fara Fenni is. Hrmmm...

I have put up a couple of pictures, and intend to put up a few more just as soon as I remember to bring my flash drive with me. I'm a forgetful geek today.

The language test consisted of a half hour conversation in Mandinka with one of the instructors and a tape recorder. Sort of fun, except for the ongoing voice in the back of my head saying that I should be serious and all that as it was my final evaluation. But, it's there, completed and on record. If I'm happy with my score, maybe I'll report it. So that all future employers can know of my precise proficiency in a language of which they've never heard.

So my last guest has gone - Amy caught a flight on Tuesday night, and as far as I know is now back in Chicago. I know I promised pictures from her trip and particularly Makasutu, and I have them, but they aren't resized so uploading them is a bear. I'm putting up one that in some way symbolizing a lot of what Amy talked about when she was here, and perhaps my mother as well...

Two of my best friends here are departing today, one after three years of service. And my close of service conference starts on Monday. The group of people I arrived and trained with are going down the coast to Kartong for the weekend to begin the end. I guess it's a bit sad, but it seems so long, the whole process, that I don't really feel much at the moment.

We get to stay in a nice hotel for the conference, so I'll not complain...

Amy has found a ticket that saves her having to swim home - for a reasonable price. All achieved with the magic of skype. And a good 24 hours of worrying back and forth how to get it done. So, there's that.

We spent the day at beautiful Makasutu, a nature reserve to which we won tickets in a raffle where Sarah's friend (also called Sarah) paid for the tickets with dalasi she was leaving behind here. I'll post pictures tomorrow.

Must go drink beer now. And eat.

My great friend Amy has been visiting me for the last almost three weeks, ever since I got up from my sickness. Which I realize I've never written about here, but I'll get to that later. Anyway, Amy came for three weeks and she leaves on Tuesday. And she just found out that her flight has been postponed

for about 14 hours, so that she will likely miss the connection in Barcelona which she bought separately. When she realized the implications of all of this, she turned to me and said,

"Oh, Africa."

It's quite apt, telling about so much of both her three week trip and my two years here. So much of the experiences are unique and memorable because of the chaos, the diversity, and the utter unpredictability of almost everything here. We've been having a great time, mostly playing with and off of that theme.

Today we went to Serekunda market, probably the busiest in the country, to shop for fabric in order for Amy and Sarah to have wrapper skirts made. The best way to buy fabric there is to hunt through the piles of small pieces of fabric that are outside of the shops, instead of the big pieces on sale inside, which they usually won't cut from the standard six meter lengths. So, Amy and Sarah demonstrated womankind's worldwide capacity to shop for much longer than mankind feels physically capable of,

and dove into countless piles of fabric in order to each buy more than twice as much as they came to buy. Good times.

After that we went to a tailor that a friend recommended, and the end result is that Amy is taking home a small pile of skirts for less than $5 each, hopefully some of which will be in a style that works in Chicago this summer.

So, the sick thing. My last post was from Dakar, where I went to have my arm looked at when it was all a mess. When I got back, I had been running nice high fevers for a few days and only marginally conscious most of the time. I went to the nurse, she gave me some ibuprofen and told me to return on Monday. I spent the weekend soaking the sheets of my bed and taking lots of the ibuprofen, having the worst headaches of me life, and when I went back on Monday morning they wouldn't let me leave again - the other nurse saw me and realized it was bad, I guess. I spent the next week in bed, lost about 15 pounds, and generally wasn't much fun. Sarah came down to help, get me food and make sure I took all the pills they were pumping into me. They never did come to a conclusive diagnosis, I was treated for malaria even though three blood tests came back negative (I take mephloquin as a prophyalaxis and it tends to hide malaria in samples, and the clinic here is known to return all negative results some days or weeks), and tested for mononucleosis, but the one nurse thought it was dengue fever. Which I guess my symptoms lined up with the most closely. In any case, I got up out of bed and went to Fara Fenni, but then stayed in my house for a week except to eat lunch and dinner. Then I came back down to the coast and slept for a few more days before Amy showed up. It was about three weeks of next to no activity, but now I'm getting stronger, and have been doing a bit of bombing around with Amy, so I think I'm definitely getting well. Somehow slowly.

The arm that was falling off the bone is now basically back into the shape of a muscle, albeit one that is smaller than before and with a bit of a funky look to it. Hopefully some yoga and good food will put it to right, whenever I can get those.

Upcountry these days is hot. Hot like a hairdryer in the face. Hot like hoofprints in the road as it melts back into liquid tar. Hot like the water in a bottle is closer to tea. Which we still boil water for and drink, even though it's hot as it is. I guess we're just idiots. The mornings are still cool most days, and the humidity is still low, so I'm not miserable yet, but it's been hard work for Amy I think. Sarah had guests come just before Amy arrived, they had a three day overlap and perhaps got Amy a bit scared (after our people in America had done the same) about the heat. When they went upcountry, they got swollen ankles and heat exhaustion for a few days, just enough to feel like they'd been tested and tell stories about how hot it is. In any case, we had more than a week of it, and she survived just fine. Even if the occasional curse slipped from our lips when we had to walk anywhere during the daytime. Now, back down on the coast, there was some moaning about how cool the wind was yesterday as we sat by the ocean. It can never be perfect, I suppose.

So, life here continues, even as it starts to feel that the end has arrived. Two months from now I will probably be back down in Kombo, wrapping up my paperwork and saying last goodbyes. It seems so short. And so long, so full of events and learning. It's always Africa, always its own place with its own rules and ways of going along. Oh, Africa.

I'm here in Dakar, on medical hold without too much to do as it's the weekend, so I'm reading a lot - currently working through A Prayer for Owen Meany, and also catching up a bit on the news. Things like this make me think that we haven't changed at all from everything that John Irving was ranting about in the 1980's. But, maybe it's naive to expect any change.

Ah, well, it's nice to be away from the U.S. while all of the nonsense of the current administration goes on and comes to light.

I'll try to put up pictures and not get worked up about things beyond my control next time. Until then...

So, I'm back in Dakar.

Peace Corps flew me up here today - I was medevac'd(!) - so that the doctor here can examine my arm, which may have a ruptured tendon on the short head of the bicep. It's a long story that I don't find interesting, so I'll not write about it, except that there is some internal swelling which has pressed against the nerve so there isn't much pain, and as an extra bonus, there are numb sections of the forearm. I suppose I'm in some sort of denial or I don't know what, but the whole thing seems a bit run of the mill and not so exciting.

In other news, the weather is rather confused these days. Fara Fenni is getting warm warm during the days, but some nights are still deliciously cool, and it seems to be just the same thing again - I know I miss the four seasons, but a part of me is adjusted to the fluctuations here and I don't seem to mind. Yet. It's still all dry heat, so I'm happy. And on the coast, it's gotten colder. Colder. Africa has upset my internal thermostat, as I'm now sitting with a long sleeve shirt on over a t-shirt, and was actually cold walking around Dakar earlier.

As you can see, things don't feel very exciting at the moment. I find myself watching things a little more closely as the sense of time drawing short develops, but it's still four or so months away, and I want to be present for that time. Not in Dakar with something out of place in my arm. Life, it's good at providing challenges on its own time.

The college basketball tournament started. I know it would be exciting if I could watch some of it, but I had forgotten about the whole thing until I saw the headlines. Ah, America.

A monday in Kombo - I came down to try to look down the road at life after Peace Corps a bit, and to get some rest. I'm getting a bit run down and having trouble with fibromyalgia and just generally trying to pull it together for the stretch run, as it's starting to feel around here. The heat is coming back, work plows on with highlights and struggles, and life continues.

I have put some photos up on the flickr site, so check there, and also posted little blurbs I wrote the last two times I've thought I was going to be able to use the internet.

Maybe I'll get to write again when my mood is a bit brighter. Cheers to all,

Now I’m at ILink, one of the premier internet cafes in the Kombos and by extension, the country. There is no internet connection. The one person working seems to be trying to get it working, which may be more than his counterpart in Fara Fenni would have once done – that business seems to have closed down in the last couple of months – but still no connection. Ah well, it’s not home and I don’t expect it to be. But, I’d love to see email, see what’s going on with a few little things, to what I can be looking forward.

Maybe I’ll try to go to the office and see if there is a connection there….

[which there was, but the office was busy and I didn't get to blog or do much besides see what email I'd recieved]

Still working to try to get the internet back at the high school - Gamtel goes away, then I'm never sure if we should be able to connect again or what. We often get the error message "error 678 remote computer did not respond." but I don't know if that's a problem here or along the way or with the Quantum Net servers in Kombo. So, we stumble along blindly.Yesterday I went to Kaur to visit a friend who is building a house in a nearby village. It's a great project, one of the things that I thought I'd be doing here, and I was excited to help out. I'm hoping to have some pictures ready to put up if I ever get an internet connection again. Fun with dirt, mud, and sweat.

I'm in Kombo for the day, got up before five this morning so that I could be at Barra for seven AM first ferry - missed it as the crowd was huge waiting and pushing and being generally very bad at queueing. I commended Sarah on the English being the world's best queuers, which she accepted gracefully. I've never even been to England. Why couldn't they teach the Gambians to queue better, she wondered? If there was anything they should have taken from their former colonial oppressors, it was skill at efficiently lining up and moving through choke points. But, alas.

I put up a post that I wrote last week, so there's that to read. Life is good, busy with work and doing projects - I now have a reading light over my bed and soon hope to have an outdoor light to go with it. Such fun in paradise!

Off to Dakar again on Friday, for the West African Invitation Softball Tournament and one more tour around the Paris of Africa. Should be fun, hope to get online again from there.

As I sat outside, after dinner in the quiet of a simple evening, I thought about what I wanted to write. The old man of the compound - the head by virtue of his being the only man past his school years, and one of my favorite Gambians - sat down next to me, talking about how the cool part of the year has already passed, and the heat is back. I agreed, not that it's actually hot yet, but it's what one does about the heat here. He told me about his trip home today - he'd been visiting relatives in Kiang, where someone had died. He got on a vehicle at 3:30 this morning to get to the paved road there, which is paved in name only, and spent about seven and a half hours getting the sixty or seventy kilometers to Soma, before crossing the river and getting back. Mostly I just thought how glad I am that it wasn't me. When I leave this place, which sometimes doesn't seem to be coming soon enough, I know I will miss the simplicity. The absurdity, the hassle and the frustration will fade, but I can almost feel already the longing that I'll one day have for the simplicity of this life. Ah, well, hopefully complexity and not having time to just sit in stillness, hopefully the trade off is worth it. Coming back from all of my adventures, all of the excitement has been a challenge. Since Ramadan I don't know how many times I've posted, but it's fewer than I'd like, and fewer than I hope to put up this month. I've loved the madness - bouncing around, having my parents visit and see my life, seeing this country from the perspective of a white person with enough money to solve some of the annoyances (which, of course, caused all new annoyances), and watching the entire caper come off brilliantly, words will never describe how great it was. And then, I had what felt like a single day and night before disappearing again - off to a place that wasn't Africa for the first time since coming here. And not just any place, but JFK airport. Many times I thought about how it would feel to arrive in the US again - it just felt like JFK. Same comfortless industrial carpet with the same chewing gum ground into it, same airplane fatigue and ugh feeling about baggage claim. I enjoy being in foreign airports where I have to decipher how they work. JFK is almost comforting in its lack of enjoyability. There must be irony there. America... two weeks I think. A blur without snow, but a tank full of family and friends and beer and chex mix and all the good wonderfulness of home. Like a crazy drug high, and then I'm suddenly leaving. The trip back here was amazing - drive to Buffalo, go out to dinner with Jon and Liz and Polly and Kenny and my mom and Toby and four Dutch women who showed up to visit him. Then get up early, go to the airport with Mom, fly to NYC and hang out with my sister for a few hours. In a random neighborhood in Queens that she read about somewhere. Fun. Then fly to Chicago, and on to Paris, arriving in the morning. Call Perrine, arrange to meet her, run into some security situation that prevented me from going to the train terminal, figure out my way around that - I really need to learn French, I realize along about then - have lunch with Perrine, get excellent directions to her parents' house along with ideas for how to spend the rest of the day. Follow her plan almost to the letter, really enjoy myself, and wind up the day having dinner with the Jegous, happy and in love with the serendipity of life. Get up in the morning, fly to Frankfurt, and then to Banjul - where the badness happens and I forget my iPod on the plane. Only realize this the next morning. I have a clear picture in my head of the pillow I glanced at, thinking I should check under it, and not for some reason. Bye bye, iPod, I appreciated you many many times. Hopefully somebody else does now. Since then, I had a four day trip to the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation project in Baboon Island to fill in as host - a great treat to be invited and a fun few days of hanging out with guests there. And then my brother came to visit. The hits just keep on coming. It was a complete blast, he rolled with every little African thing, we ran around like we seem to always do, without much of a plan or a clue, and it was ridiculous fun. He got my little host sister to teach him Mandinka, fetched water and swept for me, got all excited about eating rice (for at least the first six or seven times in a row), and generally was wonderfully positive and just easy to have here. Then we biked around for nine days, got up to Basse and back - along the south bank including another visit to Baboon Island and a rough day riding through the heat and remnants of that road. God it was fun. And Toby learned enough Mandinka to get through greetings and get his name out at the appropriate time, which everyone thought was pretty rad. It's been an amazing time. My family, I knew I missed them, but it's only now that I realize how much, and why. They are a lot of fun, thoughtful, flexible and ready to have adventures. I am very lucky, especially to have had two visits and all of this fun. And now that I'm back on my own, I get to figure it out again. How to be here, feel okay, have a rudder and a tiller and a chance to stay upright. At the moment, that's enough - not going to worry about the rest of it, the future or being alone or whatever. Because, in all honesty, everyone knows I'll not be here in five months. And it colors everything. The thought keeps bouncing into my brain - why stay? Just to finish it? Is life not more valuable than that - biding my time for five months? I love it here at times, it has been a fantastic adventure, but all of the sudden, I realize that I'm going back soon, and this will end. It will end in a fashion different from other endings - long and drawn out and inevitable. I've left other things, moved on, but never has something been so certain so far out. If I just sit in my house and put forth no effort for the next five months, I'll leave here just the same as anything else I do. And that is, in a way, more disheartening than all of the other heartbreaks about The Gambia. So: big joys, running around fun for nearly three months, and now it's over and of course I'm looking around with a little less than complete enthusiasm. My strategy: do three things everyday. Make a short list, get it done, and let the rest take care of itself. I know there are so many things from this life that I'll miss, and hope that I realize how to get as much of that as I can while I'm still here. My sentences are falling apart, that's my cue to exit.

The worst part of going to America is the dislocation, the tremendous shift in mind, attitude, and real-life location involved. I'm sure this reads as completely simplistic, but it's a head-job, for sure. In any case, I'm back, having received the love of my family and friends, gotten a little fatter on good food, beer, and chex mix, and now I'm off to have more adventures in my lovely little country over here. I wanted to write about all my feelings, experiences, and musings at length, but I'm late for dinner so you'll be spared. I'm safely back, looking forward to whatever comes, even as I'm homesick all over again, in a new way. Life!

And running around Kombo like an idiot – today was declared a national holiday by the president last night at concert with Youssou Ndour to celebrate the re-election. So, banks are closed, I need to do things that require money, life goes on.

Or, as we said when my parents were here – it’s always Africa, all the time. Third public holiday in four days – and the other day was Sunday. Enough.

I’m swamped with thoughts of what it will be like at home, and missing the time here, and everything else. I’m sure it will be a blur, and then I’ll be back, but I’m going to try to blog when I’m there, for kicks and because I want to have some regular scheduled things to do, give life some structure.

So, hope to see people, and have a Merry Christmas!

Love,

Z

I wrote this about a week ago, but am posting it on the 18th. I'll use the date I wrote it on the entry, to confuse the matter as much as possible...

So, it takes me a rant to actually sit down to write these days. I’ve been running around doing too many things of late, including a great visit from my parents and trying to get everything else done before going home for Christmas. I keep thinking that I should write, but haven’t made the time until now, when I have something annoying to write about. The national phone company, Gamtel, is perhaps the most non-functional monopoly I’ve ever conceived, some stereotypical third world. I spent three hours standing in their office the other day, increasing considering the possibility of starting my own phone company here, trying to get some handle on the concept that we had to pay for service for the roughly six to nine months when we didn't have any. They acknowledge that the didn't fix the lines for all that time, but say that we pay for the rental, and not service. And they are inventing charges or something, because the bill was still three or fours times what we would have paid if we'd been keeping up the payment while we didn't have a working line. In any case, it's working again as of today, and I've been able to finally check email. Yesterday was the first time I saw email in a long time, and I'm not even sure when I last posted. I want to get this up before I leave, so that people know I haven’t given up. My parents trip was great, truly a highlight of my life here – we got to do every cool thing I wanted to do, we powered through a lot of turf and sights and managed a good time right along. The visit to Badi Mayo was, by itself, a life-highlight, enough for a whole post of it's own. Images, too. It was a singular event in my recent life simply because I was able to make a plan, execute the steps, and things worked out well. It took me a while to realize that could even happen, I've gotten so accustomed to back-up back-up plans. Shoestrings and deep fly balls. Ah, life. I can't wait for the cold, the strangeness of snow and crisp air that doesn't feel blow dryer. It rained last night, an almost real rain storm that they say always happens around Christmas. Enough to settle the dust for a part of the morning, enough so that I noticed some extra sweat at one point during the day. And it's gotten me thinking about snowy nights in Western New York. Living with the cold, instead of with the heat. Almost feels so distant as to be laughable, but this time next week will be just that. Ha! Listening to a cd from my great friend that also brings me back to home, if not exactly home in Lakewood as home of my people. This hut that I sit in, this shack as my mother calls it, is my home at the moment, it feels like home, a project, a place where I'm me. But it never makes up for all my people that I miss, and that's probably the best reason I know for working on problems closer at hand. Africa is wonderful, amazing and makes me a richer person, but these people are not my first people, and that is enough for me to know that this isn't permanent for me. So, contact me between Christmas and New Years while I visit the other world, especially if you need sums of money moved to West Africa...