Photos: Soka le n di

As my friends in Kankan like to point out, "Soka li di," I'm a villager. Lansine and I are hanging, literally, in some vines up in a tree. As always, he strikes a karate pose. And it's not just him, you see the videos: all the kids here strike karate poses whenever I pull out a camera. Seeing as how it's all they see on TV I can't really blame them, but it is a bit odd.

My stitches. I was worried they were going to heal with a couple holes leading into my hand muscles, but my good old body kept spitting out new bursts of skin until all the holes filled in. This is about as bad a job as you could ever want done, though. Still, it's better than the clothes my village tailor turns out for me.

I've made toh before - though I've never done all the steps at the same time. Nantine (left) was so proud she wanted me to take a photo, but Bourdelaye and Wounmare decided they had to pretend to eat the toh. I just took the picture instead of waiting for the battle to stop.


The first few mango rains showed that yes, my roof still leaked; it didn't magically stop leaking since last rainy season. Well, Madi and I climbed up on the roof to fix it and now my bed is back in its old spot. No leaks! Also, my roof is now capped with an old bike tire; no more twisted vines for me; I'm moving up in the technology world.

As a friend pointed out to me, it's a sad world we live in when 50 Cent is quotable. I told Fanta what her shirt said and she thought it was hilarious. It sort of holds true here, too. Everyone is trying to get rich and eventually we all die.

Lansine, Madi, and I went out to get raffia. I was making a bee hive and they were selling it to the big city folks. This is right after Lansine jumped out of the vines (see above photo).

And after about five seconds, they start giving me karate poses. Naturally.

Lemunun Kouyate

When Nyari went back to America with my family, I figured life would be much better because I was finally free of a cat on a leash and he would stop getting death threats for stealing chickens, fish, meat, and oil from my neighbors. Well, no. Instead I got a family of mice who started stealing my food and tree seeds. They dug holes all around the base of my hut (and my family since killed two snakes trying to get into one of those holes at night - two different nights) and would make a ruckus every night and keep me awake.
So the solution was to get another cat. My friend Toure got her from his neighbors. Her mom had killed some chickens and was killed in turn. Her siblings are also all dead and she was the last one around: covered in fleas, filthy, and all bones pushing through her emaciated skin when he brought her to me. I washed her in warm water and started forcing as much food on her as she would eat. In return, it's almost as if she's imprinted on me.
She is colored very similarly to Nyari, but she's got more orange, so her name is orange (as in the the fruit) and her last name is that of the griots because she was a constant crier at first and the best way to deal with it was to pretend she was singing.
She is always looking for me to jump on my lap and fall asleep. She wants to rub on my ankles and is far more affectionate than Nyari.
However, she's nowhere near as effective a killer as he. She's a bit faster with spiders, but a lot slower with roaches. And the mice... One night I woke up to the sound of a chase. I was sleeping in my tent because it had started to rain while I was sleeping outside, so I quickly dragged it in and just kept sleeping in it. A mouse was running back and forth across the top of the tent and Lemunun was running back and forth along the side. This went on for over a minute with no progress, so I launched the mouse across the hut with a slap from below. Lemunun took off after it, but it got away. Nonetheless, they have moved out of my hut; so even if she didn't kill them, they're gone.

The family visit

I didn't take too many photos while the family was visiting. Mainly because they were taking a lot of photos. This is one of two pictures, really. I took them up the mountain and we could hardly see anything because of the smoke from all the bush fires. That said, we did see a couple fires go raging over some hills, which was sort of cool.

The real surprise was the morning I saw Amy wearing this shirt. I actually saw the back first, which is a Bagga fertility godess, Nimba. The funny thing is I saw this, the front, when I asked where she'd gotten the shirt: it says "penis" in Maninka.

Apparently the shirt is from a restaurant in Pittsburgh by someone with a rich sense of humor. The fact that she would bring it to the country where I would know what the name means and recognize the godess, though... It was pretty cool.