Softball, schools, and the zoo

Don’t have a whole lotta time here, but let’s see what we can do.

Softball – I played in a social competition thinger at the International School of Ouagadougou, which is kinda where all the ex-pats in Ouaga send their kids for schoolin. It has grass, which sets it apart from most other areas of Burkina I’ve seen. You can also buy hamburgers there for a couple dollars, or the equivalent of about 9 pounds of dried beans, or 10 pounds of peanuts, or 4 pounds of rice, or a freaking load of tomatoes, onions, cukes, and eggplants. Ah life in the capital… completely worlds away from life in village. Well, not really, because the capital has a giant market with produce and grains and such just like many other villages. The main difference is that the capital can and does cater to wealthy ex-pats and burkinabe, and even Peace Corps Volunteers can blow more money in a weekend than 80 percent of the population sees in a year. Hmm…..

Any rate, enjoy the softball pic. You can tell from the trajectory of the ball-bat that I popped this one up for an easy in-field catch. BUt things got better – Our third game I hit a home run, the next at-bat I drove in a couple runs on a deep pop-fly to right field. Awesome. I did some ok fielding too, mixed in with some frankly awful fielding. It’d been like 6 years since throwing a freaking ball, ok?

Schools – Ok, this is seed time. Seed in the sense of throwing out ideas and seeing how they catch. I got some pretty strong responses from the school pics I sent out last time, and have already received 2 potential offers from schools or school-related people back home to send some notebooks and pens and such over here. All of which are, as attested to by the inspector-general of schools in my area as well as many primary school teachers in Sabce itself, needed. In a couple weeks I will send out a more fully developed idea based on this;

oh dear; this computer will explode in 30 seconds; that is a bad error message on my screen

I had a lizeard in my house, and amouse, and a scorpion baby, and another lizard thats the zoo gotta go