Not A Real Blog Post, Part 5

Post by Lara and Kevin                                                                                    

19 November -22 December 2012

Another smattering of tidbits for your perusal:

• Kevin had to shave early in “Beardvember” for two reasons:
1.  It’s too damn hot here to have facial hair.
2.  He looks like his own evil twin.
• Rubber bands are referred to here as rubber faks [pronounced “fahks”]. This is made into a verb when talking about securing your hair, or anything else, with a rubber band.  Before we learned this, we were quite confused when the neighbor girls would tell Lara they wanted to come fak her. 
• Kevin is still practicing his engineering & design skills here in Salone! So far he has built a 4-foot bridge, a wire whisk, a watering can for our garden, a drying rack for dishes, and a hen box for our new hen.   He is also working on making toy cars out of soda cans for our neighbor kids for Christmas.
• You may have heard that Sierra Leone had a presidential election on November 17^th. The result of the election was about two weeks of no school: the first week because teachers and adult students had to travel to their precincts to vote, and the second week because they were awaiting the announcement of the election results. We enjoy telling our colleagues that in the states, Election Day itself is not a holiday, and life returns to normal the next day whether the results have been announced or not. 
• The neighbor girls taught Lara how to play hopscotch recently, only it’s not called hopscotch. It’s called A day [Krio for “I died”]. 
• Kevin has been diligently working to solve the Rubik’s cube he brought here, and he’s just a few squares away from solving it.  You might recall that when Lara did a semester in Ireland, she made the goal of solving Minesweeper at the expert level, and succeeded exactly one time.

• 

  Tommy: a very meaty cat

  Last week a student of Lara’s came over and wanted to see pictures from home, so we spent an hour or so going through photos on the computer. When he saw Tommy, our cat, he asked if we’ve ever eaten cat. We said no. He said it’s delicious. Later we showed him a photo of Smokey, Kevin’s late cat. We said she died, to which he responded, “When it died, did you eat it?” Still no.

• 

  We had to flood these ants out of our "fruit bowl"

  Apparently there is a running joke about new Peace Corps volunteers finding bugs in their food and refusing to eat the food, then as they get used to the new environment they start eating around the bugs, then they start eating everything, bugs and all, then finally they toss out the food and just eat the bugs.  We’re currently somewhere between steps 2 and 3.
• This past week was full of animal ups and downs.  First, a friend in town gave Lara a hen. Then, a fellow volunteer came to visit and brought a kitten for us. Then, we found out our hen has “bird flu” or something like it and we had to kill it.  Luckily for us, some friends of ours took it upon themselves to kill and dispose of the hen so we did not have to do it ourselves.

• 

  Lara scandalously wearing pants

  Lara had an interesting conversation with a male colleague recently that started with her wondering why many of her students are not taking her class seriously and ended with him asserting that cell phones and women wearing long pants (“trousers”) are destroying this country…then telling Lara that he holds her up as an example to his students because she doesn’t wear long trousers in public.  Note: Lara has worn trousers to school at least twice, and wears them often when she walks into town to shop. We’re not sure if this teacher is aware of that.
• Kevin is working on convincing our next door neighbor (a man, and a teacher at Lara’s school) that he does in fact know how to cook and is actually pretty good at it.  The neighbor does not seem convinced even though we have shared several home-cooked goodies with him and made sure to point out when Kevin cooked it.  This situation reached the point of silliness last week when Kevin called over while he was sautéing onions, “Sir, I am cooking!” and the response was, “no, you are parching” [parching is ‘roasting’].  We’re not sure he’s ever going to be convinced.

• 

  Our friend Lauren getting a famous Lara Trim

  Since coming to SL, Lara has given at least 10 haircuts. Three words: future job security.
• Reverse culture shock is real... even when you're just in the capital and you walk into a supermarket. There are stores here in Freetown with WHOLE departments for goods!
• Remember when we bought 2 lobsters for about 50 cents? Today we bought 2 litres of vanilla ice cream for about 10 dollars. What a world we live in.