My "first" post

Since I was just copying some e-mails before, this is the first post and it will be short! Especially since no one knows I have a blog yet.

I will be writing as I go from now on, I guess. When I get around to having Internet access, I will probably just post a million things at once. You can read it or not read it at your leisure. Also, this way I won't be bothering you will e-mails every month or whatever. Unless of course someone prefers that; I can always do both!

And since I know you want to read a story, not just something stupid: the name of my blog.

Nyari is the word for cat in Susu, which is the language my host family speaks. A few days after I arrived in their home, their kid came home with the cat. Most of the kids are terrified of the cat and I've been teaching them how to pet it, hold it, etc. I just found out Sunday the cat is a gift to me from the neighbor. I'm calling him Nyari, because to me that's a name and for the Guineans, it's normal to call cats Cat. So this way everyone will call it by its name and when I come home with it, it will have a unique name. The only question is: how on earth do you travel with a cat? I will be exploring the answer to that as it's the real reason I have never before had a cat.

In other news I went swimming Saturday. A bunch of us biked to a river some distance from our training town. About half the people I asked said crocodiles live there and half said no. I asked some people who were actually at the river and they all said yes, but the crocs like to stay in the areas with lots of trees and deep water and they almost never see them. So I still don't know whether they're really there. I do know that I only saw two kids swimming and while they were, their best friend in the world stood about two feet upstream and peed right on them.