Videos!

In agroforestry, there comes a time when you simply have to smash a termite mound into powder to use in a mud stove. Luckily, when I was doing that for our presentation to the citizens of our training town, Julie was smart enough to want to take a video and I had my backpack with camera on hand. This is the best job I've ever had.

And like any good human beings, we agroforesters know how to relax. We go swimming in the river. But since we're on bikes, even the ride home is a good time. A good time to reflect on Guinea, bells, and life.

But again we must work. Gardening is vital to people's health and life. There are already enough problems without having a population devoid of vitamins, minerals, and healthy food. So we build raised beds and transplanted tomatoes into it. This is the end of the bed-making, if I had stopped to film during the middle, well, that would have been just lazy of me.

Of course what kind of blog can be named Travels with Nyari and yet have no photos of Nyari himself? This one apparently; so I'll have to settle for a video, which happens to be the first video or photo I shot in country. This is from the front porch of my home during training, eating breakfast with Nyari when he was just a kitten. He's about twice as big now, and many more times as deadly.

There was one morning I woke up and had electricity to light the room. After I'd gotten completely ready for the day (field trip) and prepared the key to give to the neighbors (family was out of town), I saw a spider walking across my wall. Not just a spider, but the king of spiders. Look at Katie's blog if you need a visual, she has a photo of a spider carrying a baby mouse, which she said was bigger than her hand. Well, I described my spider as big enough to strand over my face with ease and I didn't waste time trying to take a photo. I grabbed a machete and a daba and tried to kill it. But it was too fast and hid in my books. And I couldn't find him.

That evening, my neighbor, who was guarding the key, lost it, so I had to run off to work on a project (see the termite mound video, yup that same day) and come home after dark. Julie suggested I use a broom on the spider instead of a machete. Well, I got home and the electricity wasn't on, but I saw the spider anyway; it was too hard to miss, even with a tiny flashlight. I grabbed a broom and started sweeping him. The whole venture seemed futile to me until Nyari saw the spider and decided he was still hungry. He pounced on it and I'm guessing it was dead after the first bite. It took him a while, but he finished the whole thing and I had never been happier since arriving in Guinea.

Spider problem? Get a broom and a cat!