About time... sheesh.

So, it's been brought to my attention that I'm a lousy Blogger. (Thanks Carol-Lee and Nadine for the reminder).

Sorry to you all... :)

To make it up to all of you, I will write two blogs in the near future. The one which you are reading now, and the second one stuffed full of pictures! woot! You non-Facebookers will be in for a treat, these are pictures that have not graced the internet up to this point! Finally, you'll have one up on Facebook!

Where to begin?

I'm sitting here, waiting for a plumber to show up. He was supposed to be here within half an hour, but this is Africa, so that means anywhere between an hour to two days. We had our leaky shower repaired a little while ago, but when he fixed it, something else leaks, so now we've got a nice water stain in our ceiling...

The power has been on since before 6:30 this morning (it's about 11:15am now) so that's pretty sweet. Power doesn't usually stay on that long. Quite rare, actually. Lot easier to get things done when there's power on! Like charge some batteries... turns out most of mine are dead. Actually, I think a whack of them are goners. They're just mixed in with all my other batteries. Kinda annoying. I don't have anything that just takes ONE battery, so I can't test them. My camera takes 4 so it's really hard to narrow it down.

Rainy season has started here. It's quite an exciting time of year! Harmattan (the only other 'season') is very dry and even more so dusty. I've probably mentioned it in a blog before, last year maybe, but I'll refresh your memories. During Harmattan, the wind blows from the North, where the Sahara Desert is. So during this time of year, dust/sand is in the air. It settles EVERYwhere. If I insisted on keeping things dust-free, I would have to clean everything at least twice a day. Everything gets visibly dusty within hours. Pretty annoying. Especially since you're also breathing in all the dust too. My nose and throat hate Harmattan... This, along with the heat during that time of year (no cloud cover either) makes rainy season a much looked forward to event. It cools down, the dust is gone, and things start getting green... entire fields that looked like nothing but brown-red dirt suddenly transform into lush green! Grass is growing, plants are showing up, farmers are ecstatic!

Water can be quite scarce, so rains are looked upon as a blessing. Gathering water is a long, hard (and heavy) task. Every morning you'll see dozens of Nigerians with jerry cans (aka, the bucket brigade) searching for a place to fill up so they can have drinking, cooking and bathing water. When it rains, there's safe, clean, easy and available water is everywhere. One of the first times it rained this year, a Nigerian came into the one office with a HUGE grin. Asked why he was so happy, he said "I don't have to collect water for THREE days!!"

Coming from a society obsessed with buying water in plastic bottles rather than 'risk' perfectly fine tap water, it's quite the difference.

Out here, the tap water (when there is any, but don't count on it...) actually ISN'T safe to drink. We have to run it through a filter first. People who don't have a filter, have to boil it. Those who don't have gas stoves or can't afford to buy wood, are stuck drinking not-so-safe water. Recently, a tree had to be felled on our compound. It was a healthy tree, but it was growing too close to one of the retaining walls. Had the rains come before the tree was cut out and the wall repaired, the Hogerterps would've had to wade through their house. One of the guards must've been told he could keep the wood if he chopped it up, so for days all we would hear was Daniel grunting as he hacked up this big tree with an axe. He'd knocked it down then started chopping up the large trunk (about 2.5 feet in diameter). At one particular time I heard him grunting loudly, so I came out to see what what happening. After another couple swings, he chopped the trunk in two. He proudly put his foot on it and told me "It gave me wahalla, so I gave IT wahalla!" Wahalla is a Hausa word that means trouble, difficulty, pain in the butt... that kinda thing. It's also just a really fun word to say. Waaa-HALLA!!

Anyway. I'm kinda jumping around all over the place in this blog. meh. You asked for a blog, you got one! Stop being so picky...

I had pretty lousy day a few days ago. Just wasn't too much fun. I've got to do a lot of data stuff at work (pretty dull) and it's all from surveys collected in the past few years. STACKS of this stuff. And it's not organized. Well, they're in piles, which apparently counts as organization. I said to a staff member there that we NEED to have these in folders, if they get mixed up, NO one will be able to tell what's what! Years worth of work and VERY important data would be useless. A month and a half later, (on my lousy day) I was again struggling with some of this data because of the lack of organization. I explained again how we need folders to keep this info organized. The reason I was given why there still were still no folders after a month and a half? The secretary "isn't in today."

arg.

Then, the one thing that keeps me sane while I do mundane data work, my iPod, decided it hates me. Deleted all my music AND refuses to cooperate with my laptop. Meaning I have an 80Gig paperweight. Pretty sucky.

So, the plumber showed up. It's around 2 now (I took a lunch break). He barely looked at the water stained ceiling before saying something along the lines of "it's not wet..." and "I can't see any water leaking..." Meaning he doesn't think he needs to do anything about it. Even at my insistence that the giant brown mark and saggy (not to mention falling apart) ceiling was not like that before one of his guys worked on it. He did not seem at all interested in fixing it. He said he'd come back tomorrow to see if it was leaking then.

Not a whole lot else to say. It's about 3 in the afternoon now. Lo and behold, we still have power! I don't think I've EVER known it to be on this long before! It's been on since around 6 (that I know of, could've been on before that) until now! 9 whole hours already! MAN. Things in my freezer are actually frozen! I'm pretty excited.

hmm, I think I'll be taking a crack at that giant photo-filled blog post now. Don't want to have promised a post and then deny my hardcore readers!

I'd love to hear from you! Feel free to leave a comment, write an email (trevormalda@yahoo.ca) or look me up on Facebook!