Everything is made of cheese

Life! How does it work??

Since you last heard from me, I aged eleven months, got dengue fever, got robbed, my wife done left me, and she took the kids too.


I live in Accra now, in a distinctly different situation from last year's. I work in an office in support of a small vegetable marketing project paid for by Swedes, I also contribute some to our main program as well. As sad as I am to have left wonderful Bolga for much less savoury Accra, living here affords me some priceless good things which, all in all, make it a better than fair trade.

In few words, whilst I was lonely in Bolga, I feel like I have a family now.

In conversation with a friend the other day, I mentioned a trip I will take soon to Cambridge and Vancouver to (as I said it) "see my family, and then see my biological family". Perhaps I've disobeyed the dictionary definition of the word, but my usage reflects simply how I feel about people. Y'all are functionally my family, that's why I'm coming to see you. 13th October, ya-hoo!!

Same here in Accra. I really really like the folks I've got to know and who I spend my time with. They are great people, and I'm getting super attached to them. I feel like they're becoming my family, small small. I don't want it to sound like my biological family ain't my functional family too. They are, and I adore them. I just like having a big family, and lots of it. Okay, enough mushing.



---



The nature of my work and life these days means that I have much fewer photographs of it to share. I get out to field sites less, and spend more time at a desk or on the phone. Even when I visit my project, I'm more of a supervisor or asset to the program staff rather than a worker or an implementer.

Well, it is what it is.

I'll share with you a few shots I took on a site selection trip I took a while back:


Lots of cabbages!


Goats! How do they do it?


Visiting some vegetable plots at the end of the airfield when this jet flew overhead, coming in to land


A good old fashioned Ghanaian shit truck



---



Living in Accra also grants me access to a bunch of other fun things to do:


Photo: James R

I had the great honour and privilege to learn to sail from the beautiful and talented Sondy Springmann, who was in town for a brief 7-week stay.

Sailing is hard (also, fun!). Teaching sailing is harder. I definitely remember an instance where I was swerving the boat all over the place because I didn't yet have the coordination to handle the sail and rudder at the same time. Sondy was guiding me while I fought the rudder in a hard turn, when her instructions stopped abruptly. I turned around to see her flying sideways out of the boat. Moments later, I was hurled out myself as the boat rolled sharply the other way and showed its keel to the sky. Thanks, Sondy, for your immense kindness and patience.

This was one of the most perfectest days I've had in recent memory. Remember the old Nor Easter times? Same joy. There I was sailing on the Volta estuary: perfect temperature, leaning out of a speeding sailboat over flat water, with nice breeze, sunshine through the clouds, surrounded by palm trees and in the company of some of the nicest and warmest people I know or have met at the absolutely brilliant one-and-only Ghana Sailing Club. Throw in some cold beers and a hot barbeque, and you got yourself a recipe for paradise right there.

I'll omit the part where James and I capsized and half-sank an old, leaking Hobie cat and needed a rescue tow.


Photo: Sondy S

I've also been climbing a lot. In this picture, the right honourable James Regulinski, the lovely Danielle Knueppel and good ol' yours truly crushing on the Bat Cave, T-Rex, and Kelly's Corner/the Grand Deception respectively, from left to right. Okay, everyone crushes their routes except me. Kelly's Corner sounds like a cute little bakery and cafe where the pastries are sweet and the coffee is strong, but it's more like a medieval torture device or an extended camping trip with the in-laws. And that, my friends, is the grand deception.

Getting a couple of hours out of the city every weekend to a green green place with great views and even better company, climbing rocks and making jokes, does wonders for my sanity and general well-being. A nice side benefit is that I'm getting in some shape from pulling on rocks all the time. I don't think I've ever before in my life developed so much excess strength or ability, and moved with so much...confidence? Not quite the word, but something like it.



--- this next section is rambly, skip to the end if you'd like



I've been thinking a lot, recently, about money. Everything costs money. Well, lots of stuff does. Money helps you do things, it "gets you to where you wanna go". Money's good to have handy, but it also ain't no good if you don't spend it.

I've started to keep a loose track of my net worth with spread sheets and graphs, to see what the trends are. Nothing too obsessive, just a sample of each of my accounts once every two weeks. Fortunately, I find I'm net saving money since I got here. Unfortunately, I've been spending beyond my means for the last month or so.

I'm pretty sure I know the major offender in this case: a few thousand miles on aeroplanes. Of course, I ain't complaining. This is money I'm gladly spending. It's also money that's made me reflect on, understand and get a better idea what's important to me. The big picture. I've recently gained some wisdom about how money can buy happiness and I have some thoughts of my own to add. I've learned a ton of stuff from the rest of this blog, I highly recommend it.



Each day that passes, I realise more and more that I'm a(n extremely) social animal (an animal, certainly). Those who know me probably don't think I'm particularly extroverted or outgoing, and they'd be right, I ain't. But I'm definitely social, and I'll define it thus: "I want and need to spend lots of time with people, especially excellent people, especially people I like and care about. How I feel, what I think about and what I do, and the basis for the decisions I make all depend very strongly on the people around me and who matter the most to me." Community, family, so on.



So I've started to evaluate my expenditure based on whether and how it will improve my happiness, with the perspective gained from this key knowledge (how my money goes towards increasing the amount and/or quality of time I can spend with people and so on).



Sample evaluation of spending:

-Motorcycle (yes, I now ride a motorcycle): helps me see folks more frequently and easily: meet them places, call on them. Therefore, this is a good purchase. Admittedly, I quite like things that go fast on two wheels...and this motorcycle sure does go fast. The other great thing about motor vehicles in Ghana is that it's pretty easy to re-sell, and they hold their value well.

-Climbing gear: helps me not bum climbing gear off my friends, or helps me bring friends climbing, also adds infrastructure and enables us to climb more and different things. Therefore, this is a good purchase. Admittedly, it's nice to have toys again! I don't own that much stuff in any case, and it's a durable good, so not a constant expenditure.

-Going to restaurants nicer than I would usually: a chance to spend more time with dear friends. If I really have to put up with nice food for that, then I guess I have to live with that (: It's probably not all that much money in the grand scheme of things.

-A few thousand miles on aeroplanes: helps get me to where my peeps are, helps me and folks get to somewhere where we are going to have an extremely opportune, well justified and legitimately bad ass awesome time this November (you'll know who you are and where we're going when you read this)




You get the picture. It seems pretty straightforward (to me at least), but I didn't always think this way. Now that I do, it's doing wonders for my conscience and peace of mind. I'm instinctively a very financially conservative person, so it was a real leap to take to start spending more than I make. I almost need a list of things-I-won't-say-no-to.

Certainly, I won't (can't) spend more than I earn in the long run. All things considered, I'm quite risk averse with money and do save most --literally (and much) more than half!-- of what precious little I make here. I'll come out on top. And in any case, I still have significant savings, and I do have a few safety nets. I own a wee bit of stock...



---



That's all for now, folks. You might see more out of me, you might not. Writing takes time and energy and free space, but sometimes I also feel like I just have something I want to write down: to get it out and help me think it through, for posterity, you know, all that.

They're two opposing pressures, the cost and the benefit, the can and the want, and every time one of them overcomes the other, you'll see something go up here. And sometimes, it just comes: I basically wrote this in one take, where I usually do a few re-drafts and lots of editing.

Until next time, gentle reader...lost of love, yours truly, Jungle Boy, Sushi Roll, or whatever else you might know me as.

shooting from the hip in the dark

I'm really not a very good photographer. However, I occasionally (if you look back through this blog, I've got a few good ones tucked in there).

I still think this blog is not rich enough in photos, so I'll make this a post with more photos and less words. You'll get to see me a few times, get a little sense of what I'm doing, and enjoy a few lucky shots I took that aren't particularly meaningful, but just nice.

--

Here we are a village called Navio, one of the best performing in IDE's program. On Steven's farm, we're setting up a drip irrigation kit.

Steven and I are pounding the earth around the support legs for the kit's header bag. In the bottom of the picture you can see the main and lateral lines which send water to the plants.

At another site, Anna and I installed a small electric pump to lift water from a well. AC electric pumping is the most effective of any kind of pumping.

It was a real surprise to me that most people here didn't know that you could run a pump off electricity-- they only knew that it could run lights, radios, TVs and fridges. Another curious thing is that most people don't know the word "electricity", and usually say "light" and less commonly (more understandingly) "current".

--

At the local mill, I catch this lucky shot:

Incredibly, I manage it again:

There has to be a name for this shot: the feint portrait, of someone unposed, watching the photographer and is unaware of being photographed.

--

I once met a photographer who told me that photography is about controlling the amount and duration of light "falling on the film" by changing only three things: shutter, aperture and sensitivity. Since I can do none of the above, most of my photos from Ghana look the same, since it's so sunny all the time.

It's amazing what a little shade and shadow can do. It can turn the most commonplace scene into something more dramatic and interesting.

Finally, unlike most other geeky types, I don't really like using the word "fail", the classic lol-style being to attach it to some subject to denote a lack of success in that thing. However, when this showed up on my phone, it was too rare and funny not to take note of.

Thick as a brick

It's funny how we adjust to our surroundings-- that what might be amazing or incredible for someone else is just normal to us if we experience it everyday.




--

I asked a local friend if she ever looked up and noticed how many stars there are in the sky. She said she did, but I didn't get the sense she found it as remarkable as I did. I can see the milky way almost every night that isn't a full moon here. I haven't been many places where this is possible.

Yet, even I am getting numb to this wonder. I used to be in awe every time I looked up at night but sometimes I simply forget to these days. It's only when I go to a bigger city and come back here that I remember I should.

--

My colleague Anna and I decided the other day to take a shortcut between two stops we had to make at work. It involved getting off the main road and using a derelict airfield to get straight to the village roads, and cutting out a large part of the main road that went out of our way. Basically, it was a very sound plan. I'd done it before, too, during the dry season.

We took the turn off the main road and got on a little dirt path. As we rode on, the path got narrower and narrower, we slipped and slid through a few swampy patches in it, and finally the path disappeared completely and we were riding through ankle high grass that completely obscured the ground.

Still, I was sure the airfield was only a little ways on, and we pushed on through the grass that got higher and higher...now it was knee high.

"Have you ever gone swimming in the sea, Anna?"

"No" (I didn't ask Anna if she could, but lots of Ghanaians can't swim, they actually think it quite remarkable if you can)

"This really reminds me of it. Kind of scary, you know? If you can imagine, you look down and you can't really see what's--wwooOOOOAOAAAHH!!"

...and without warning, the earth falls away beneath all the grass. We're airborne for a second, and the next, we find ourselves in a shallow stream. It was perfect, genius timing. It almost made me believe in God, because if I was God, I'd be doing stuff like that all the time to people.

We got our feet soaked pulling the bike out (it was completely bogged in). It was actually very fortunate there were two of us there because neither of us would have been able to do it on our own.

We carried on, skirting around the stream, and moved to higher ground, making guesses and theories about where the airfield was. As we went on, we found ourselves in grass that was waist high, which is actually a beautiful sight to see, just the handlebars of the bike above what looks like a sea of green and gold wheat swaying in the afternoon sun. Blue sky, big fluffy white clouds, deep red earth, it was really quite a sight to behold. It's a real shame I don't have any pictures.

Then, the grass got shoulder high and really thick, and we were bashing through it, as it dragged our feet off the bike and got in our faces and pulled at our clothes and backpacks. When we weren't in the thick stuff, we were slipping and sliding and bogging our way through the mushy mud around some rice fields.

Finally, we broke out of all that nonsense and found ourselves on a small dirt path that led to a larger dirt road that led directly up to the airfield. We realised that if we turned off the road just a few hundred metres later than we actually had, we would have saved an hour being lost and our feet would still be dry.

Well, I had fun anyway. You have to appreciate this kind of stuff. Even when God sneezes* on you, I suppose it's an honour.

*I decided this was the least offensive (to readers) bodily function I could use, although I'm sure you realise I was thinking of using a much funnier one.

--

The other day, I was moving a two-wheeled tractor and trailer from Navrongo (town) to Navio (village), a sweaty, bumpy tiring two++ hour ordeal under the hot Sahel sun.


A machine such as this-- 

in this picture, Thomas, one of our friends, is learning to operate it so that he can run a business transporting stuff around the area, and we can collect data about his workings for a feasibility study for these machines in this area.

These things are harder than they look. A really rough clutch, clunky steering and absence of any kind of suspension join forces with the most unpredictable but otherwise unresponsive throttle on the planet to make this a real bucking bronco.

Tractor-trailer vehicles are really crazy in reverse, and require a whole new different kind of intuition. They're still difficult, even after you've learned it. I have a lot of respect for truck drivers now.

As I passed through a police barrier between Navrongo and Navio, we waved hi and smiled at each other, and I don't think they noticed that I didn't have plates, and perhaps it was not completely obvious that I would not have a license for agricultural equipment. I think it was my good fortune that I passed through just as the officer on duty was tucking into a bowl of banku and soup.

Somewhere along the way, I passed an army of little school children on their way home. Of course they started yelling and smiling and saying "Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello!" like they always do (and then "How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you?" after that), and then before I knew it, ten of them had jumped into the back of the trailer and hitched a ride. Three more were hanging off the back and letting me pull them along on their bikes, while another throng cycled alongside us.

I really should have pulled out my camera and took some pictures. I guess it's a lesson I'll never stop learning.


--


This post didn't have as many pictures as I'd like to have in it so...here's one of the world's coolest ladder! It belongs to my friend Francis.

Strange fruit

1. A song performed most famously by Billie Holiday. A strangely morbid blues standard condemning the lynching of African Americans, and other racism. It has a huge history of references and covers. In 1999, Time called it the song of the century. It's also been #1 on the list of "songs of the South" and on of the "top 20 political songs"

2. Literally uncommon fruits.

In Ghana, I've had the opportunity to partake of a variety of different fruits I'd never tasted before.

We in the west most commonly eat the nut (seed) of the cashew. However, little known to most of us, the cashew tree also produces a large fruit (biologically not a true fruit -- the true fruit contains the cashew nut) along with each cashew nut. Here's what it looks like (the cashew nut is the little bean shaped thing hanging below the large cashew "apple")

The fruit is very sweet and juicy, with a rich and complex taste. I like it a lot.

The next I tasted was the fruit of the baobab tree. Baobabs are the famously long-lived and iconically strangely shaped trees of Africa. Their fruit is large, and covered in a short, soft fur, almost velvet-like. The shell is brittle, and cracks open to reveal rows and rows of seeds surrounded by a dry, powdery fibre.

This fibre is edible, and tastes sweet but is otherwise uninteresting. I hear people mix it with milk to make a drink.

The most recent one I've got to eat is the fruit of the shea tree. The most well known product of the shea tree is the refined oil obtained from the seed of its fruit. Refining shea butter is a very common practice throughout the dry Sahel region of West Africa, where shea is from. The oil is edible, although we in the west are most well acquainted with its smoothness and moisturising properties (we rub it on ourselves, it's also in a lot of cosmetic products).

The shea fruit (pictured here with its nut) is kind of an intense experience. Imagine an avocado with a thin, edible skin, and that is sweet and (tastes) twice as fatty as the average avocado, and then shrink it down to the size of an apricot. That's a shea fruit. Pretty wild.

--

That's all the strange fruit we have time for today, and all I've eaten in Africa so far (though cashews are actually native to Brazil). I did eat a ton of wild blueberries in Maine when I was visiting my little sister, but that's another story for another time.

swinging

Dear readers,

It's been far too long. Any whilst I can't think of anything specific or significant to write about, I figured I had to break the seal or you might just never hear anything from me again.

-

Slowly enough as not to be immediately recognised, but quickly enough to be quite stunning indeed, rains have changed northern Ghana from a place that looks like this

to a place that looks like this (featured here is Francis, basically my favourite farmer ever).

It's not all peaches and jello and fresh cream though. The rains are by my reckoning between one and two months late this year, which is a lot of trouble for everyone.

Farmer or not, just about everyone here grows millet, corn and perhaps rice during the three months of rain, to eat during the rest of the year. The maths is simple: if it don't rain, people don't eat.

Fortunately, the rains have finally come. In fact, against all odds these late rains are much too heavy, which is just as bad as being not heavy enough. They're flooding crop land and causing erosion. A few nights ago, a huge storm put a foot of standing water in Bolga town.

-

I'm busier than ever. I really enjoy working for my super amazing boss (foreground) and with my super amazing colleague (behind him), here meeting some nice farmers who we tested solar-electric powered irrigation equipment with.

Some interesting projects I'm working on are different systems of powered irrigation: one of the more promising avenues we're looking to test is on-grid electric pumping.

Another exciting project is to simultaneously increase tillage capacity and create local business opportunities by using Asia-style two wheeled tractors. We're still doing studies and putting numbers together but it looks promising.

(Anna, my super amazing colleague demonstrates)

-

I've also learnt over the last couple of months how important it is to take breaks and holidays to keep strong and keep going. I had a fantastic two weeks in Maine/Cambridge, and I am eternally grateful to everyone who made it a great time. If you're reading this, you probably know who you are.

That's all I have the energy to write right now. If you're reading this,...thanks for reading. I'll leave you with a picture I took the other day:

(If you look really close, you can see a double rainbow)

PS despite being slow on the blog, I think I've been pretty good about posting interesting stuff to my google reader feed, so check that out too!

You talkin' to me?

I thought I might never get one of these























But then I did (I need it for work). So the very next thing I did was














rent a friend's taxi, and do some heavy moving of treadle pumps, solar panels, and PVC. It was a day full of adventure. First, the police pulled me over and told me it was "not proper" to carry 20ft PVC pipes on my roof. They let me off without too much fuss, and I didn't even have to bribe them. It must have been my charms.

Next, the transmission shaft fell out because of a loose bearing (apparently it "does this all the time"), and we had to bring a mechanic by motorcycle to fix it.

Everyone we met or encountered was amused and entertained-- like they'd never seen a white taxi driver before!

-

Then, on my way home, completely exhausted after a long day, I started to hear a rhythmic thumping and a strange vibration all through the car. It started to get really intense and I thought the whole car was about to come apart.














What was happening, was that one of the tyres was disintegrating and slapping itself against the wheel well, and bumping down the road because as it lost more rubber, it ceased to become round. As you can see, there's just about nothing left, you can see the steel belting and there's almost too little rubber left for it to hold together.

I changed the wheel with the help of some taxi drivers (thank god there was a spare). (the wheel bolts were almost completely stripped and I worried that we'd be able to fix the new wheel securely)

To top it off, the weather was miserable. Rainy and cold in the morning to hot and humid in the afternoon.

-

Well, if IDE lays me off, I know what I can do to make some dough.

starz n barz

Northern Ghana was the last place I expected to find a minibus flying the confederate flag.

I wasn't sure whether to be amused, or frightened for my life.

Yee...haw?

Awesome biscuits from Africa

Notorious BRB

There's been a small drought of blog posts out of me lately. I know I promised a blog about work but it's surprisingly hard, after long days in the hot sun followed by reports about what happened on long days in the hot sun, to write blogs about long days in the hot sun. Even though I'm enjoying this job more everyday.

It's hard to take photos that would go well on blogs when I'm focused on taking detail photos of pumps and trying to fit whole gardens into my viewscreen, like in this exciting little number!

I'll try to sneak in some photos of farmers gardening or kids playing or something.

Anyway, more extra exciting things are happening at work and I'm so excited that I just might write about them. So don't worry about the title of this post, it's not that I'm taking a hiatus from writing this, all will come in its own time. Meanwhile, here's a short list of things on my radar:

-

In no particular order:

1. Lee Kuan Yew is "officially" out. I think this is a very good public step, albeit after firmly establishing the Lee Dynasty in Singapore government, and it's uncertain what he will do "despite" being out of office.

2. On a related note, Singapore just had its "most upsetting" election recently. I say "bout damn time". Everyone on "both sides of the government" is talking about how the political climate in Singapore is changing and that's a good thing. Singapore has a very uncommon but also quite nuanced political situation, and it's hard to recommend a good source that will describe the whole picture.

I found quite a few neat places to get very sharp, objective opinions and information about it, a couple of articles I really liked are here at molly meek and here at the online citizen. They might be a bit dense if you don't already know some about Singapore politics, but they get my super snobby stamp of approval.

Unfortunately, most Singaporeans would prefer to read utter drivel from Xia Xue (who I only just found out about before the elections). I wrote in a very polite comment to clarify five thousand factual mistakes she made but she predictably wouldn't let it go up, so maybe when it rolls around to "that time of the month" I'll write a heartfelt blog about why Xia Xue is the worst blogger in the entire sphere.

3. Since this has been so many words (and so much about politics!) and I have resolved to give more pictures and fewer words, I'll only add...huh, well maybe that was it. Well, this isn't news, I found out that the King of Thailand is a super amazing awesome jazz musician poet writer olympic sailor and apparently a really great guy to boot. And there's a huge controversy about the death of his brother (originally chosen to be king), and that Thai politics are quite brutal and sad but also very interesting and occasionally inspiring.

-

4. I'm also getting pretty decent at the guitar, learning about keys and intervals and chord structures as I learn how to play un-tabbed songs by ear and transpose them around. I think that this extra music knowledge might help me learn the piano again.

MX missile proof

Anyone catch the Andrew Bird reference?

I chipped a tooth today, took a whole corner off, in fact. Unlike in the song, I didn't fall upon the ground, but rather bit upon a rock in my rice.

I've been eating the local red rice despite the rocks because it's not possible to find unpolished imported rice, so I guess I had it coming.

Despite the whole "local vs import" hoohah I wrote about some while back, seeking local is still instinctive for me, and I wonder if I would not have eaten local rice if I knew this would happen.

I wonder how many Ghanaians chip their teeth every year. I wonder where/if/how they get them fixed.

grim piñata

Just a little something I've been pondering from running around Ghana

-

Some folks get rid of trash like this:

(I know it doesn't seem like much, but I took this picture on short notice so I wasn't able to find a good place that had a representative amount of trash. Also, every square inch of the ground here is covered in this thin layer of trash here. real picture from northern Ghana)

-

Others get rid of trash like this:

(massive volume, extremely concentrated. stock photo)

-

In one case, a few suffer intensely (people who live near landfills). In the other, everyone suffers mildly (people also usually burn their trash, which includes plastic). In one case, the pollution is extremely concentrated, in the other, extremely widespread.

Although it is impossible to control for the sheer volume of waste in the second situation, in order to ask this question, can we still ask: which is worse?

Italian jobs

Hi everyone!

If you like okra and you like risotto, you'll love my world famous original silky-smooth Okrisotto! With all the silky smoothness of okra AND risotto! (if you had as much time on your hands as I do, you'd cook up some pretty interesting food for yourself)

Italians who read this will probably be furious, but then most Europeans I've met are (not uniformly, but) on average too uptight about their "culture". The difference is that the French say "zaat ees not fwwranssaayyy!" and the Italians say "daa ta eee sa nooo ta eetaliaaaaaaaannno!"

Okay, that's enough fun at the expense of the continental folk. I've never had much reverence to culture, especially when it comes to food. Another of my world famous recipes is hommus made with edamame beans and balsamic vinegar. It's really good (all hommus is better with balsamic).

Also, don't let anybody tell you you need special rise to make risotto. Use any old rice you want!

-

In fact, I'm so amazing I invented a whole four different functional prefixes that describe a certain kind of risotto that I've recently developed.

Okri-sotto: risotto with okra

Curri-sotto: Curry risotto

Red-sotto: Risotto with whole red rice and beets

Waakye-sotto (waa chee sotto): Risotto and beans (waakye is a ghanaian rice and beans meal)

Combinations are possible: okurri-sotto is risotto with curry and okra.

-

Now, after reading this, it is your duty to run out into the world and cook up some crazy stuff. Here's another family of foods that lend itself easily to modification: the pad's.

I think "pad" (the one in "pad Thai") simply means "fried", but since it's most commonly associated with fried noodles, you can go out and make your own pad-anything.

A few of you have eaten (also world famous) pad woon in Cambridge...

In service of the public announcement

Most traditionally long-lived peoples consume some kind of lacto-fermented food, whether it be sauerkraut, yoghurt, miso, or any of the whole world of them out there.

I've been making my own kimchi here, and so can you! It's really simple, just mix salt, sliced cabbage, onions, garlic and chiles in a bowl,

compact the mixture and put a constant pressure on it so it stays submerged in its own brine.

The submergence is important because the salt inhibits the growth of other organisms while allowing the desired lactobacteria to flourish. I like using identical bowls that have sloped flat sides (bell shaped sides make fitting more tricky): because of the way they fit in each other, you can stack two...or five on top of each other, each filled with kimchi.

A word of warning: a diet high in salt might be linked to an increased incidence of stomach cancer, so enjoy in moderation! By my reckoning the health benefits are from these foods replenishing gut flora, so just a little is enough.

-

Against all odds, my beets are surviving and thriving. I'm super excited and just built two more beds for more future beets. They're a little small (they are about 2/3 time to harvest now) this round but it's probably just the heat and dryness.

I think the rainy season will be glorious for beet growing. Right now I need to hand-water them all the time so they don't die, but when the rains come I think they'll practically grow themselves.

-

In other news, I'm going to Bangladesh on for a week this Saturday. More excitement and adventure!

hot hot heat

I'd forgot what it feels like to have a hangover, thanks to years of uncharacteristically responsible drinking...

...that is, until I got here. Everytime I go out, I come home feeling like a beef jerky with a splitting headache. Even thought I drink (like) ten litres of water a day. I guess I'm pretty good at sweating it all out. Today's high: 45 (113) degrees

Oh yeah. And yesterday we had a surprise hail storm.

A courtesy picture of the countryside. I think this place is described as a "mid desert" or something like that. Much drier than the tropical south, but more vegetation (and water, when there is water) than a true desert.

Quite a pleasant place, really. Some of the biggest trees here are mango trees. I never associated mango trees with big-ness, but there they are, huge lush thick green trees surrounded by sand and dust and dead grass.