Not a Real Blog Post #8

Post by Lara and Kevin

10 May - 11 June 2013

 Random thoughts about life etc:

• In true form, Africa by Toto came onto the iPod while a rainstorm just opened up the sky to dump water on our little town.  Thanks again Pat for leaving your footprints all over my iPod.
• Did you know mangoes come in several varieties? So far we’ve noted “common” mangoes, big cherry, small cherry, “Laberrie,” “Shape-tone,” kerosene mangoes, “rope-rope,” and Guinea mangoes.  We like Shape-tone and big cherry best.  Kerosene mangoes, as expected, are not yummy.

Left to right: Common Mango, Big Cherry, and Shapetone

• Our new favorite thing to buy in Bo and Freetown and take home with us is ultra-pasteurized milk and a box of cereal. We buy ice to cool the milk and then eat the whole box in a sitting because if we don’t it’ll get stale really fast.  Fun fact: the days we eat milk and cereal are some of the few days that our daily intake of calcium comes from something other than fish bones.

Adam Reim is so happy with his milk shake that we found in Freetown!

• We were enthralled last week when our house was visited last weekend by a flock of Great Blue Turacos—they’re basically really pretty chicken-sized birds that eat fruits and buds from trees, usually flying from grove to grove in a group of 6 or more.  Look them up—they’re awesome!

Unfortunately this is the best picture I could get of one in the trees.

Occasionally we would have people try to sell us animals. This is a baby Turaco.

• You may or may not have noticed from the pictures we’ve posted, but both of us have lost some pounds since moving to Salone.  In a recent doctor appointment, our doctor told Kevin that he doesn’t think it’s right that the two people in our group known as the “cooks” are losing weight here. I guess we need to work on that.
• We recently came into some furniture—a couch and an armchair— by means of what I’ve decided to call “African Craigslist”.  Our friend called one day: “You said you want a couch, right? Well my friend is selling one. You can pay her the money and pay the man with the tractor to deliver it to your house”. And that’s what we did! The furniture came chugging to our house on the back of a power tiller.  I wish I took a picture.

After some exhausting work, it was great to have some nice furniture to sit in!

• We just spent 20 minutes explaining to our Sierra Leonean friends that where we used to live, we would commute 20 to 40 miles daily for our jobs—here, the 52-mile trip to Bo is pretty much always done over a weekend so you have recovery time in between trips.
• When we first moved to Sierra Leone, we were weirded out by all the strange things for sale everywhere we went. Now we embrace it. In a recent trip, Kevin bought bread, flip-flops, ginger beer, sunglasses, and a knife without leaving his seat on the bus.

In this drive thru, you can buy a pint of honey and some pineapples.

• On a related note, one of our taxi drivers in Freetown went "shopping" for a pair of white socks while driving down the road one time. He ended up looking at all the options and deciding not to buy, much to the chagrin of the boy who had run a few hundred yards alongside the car by that point.