Picture of a goat that I just realized there's a baby in

Baby goats are funny. Kind of like little rattlesnakes. They just go up between any two legs - usually they get the mama part right, but even that is touch and go sometimes, and they only really have about a fifty percent success rate with front and back legs - and then they just strike around until they happen to land a nipple in their mouth. I'm not sure how they haven't died out yet.

These are my friends!

This is what my friends look like!


But I make funny faces here, too.

For Dave

A long, long time ago, I promised David a picture of this great beautiful waterfall we went to go see. So finally, here are some pictures. NB: Mali does not typically look like this.
That little tiny person up there in blue is me. To which Liza would say, of course. Turns out that before you leave for the Peace Corps you should have someone else check your wardrobe to make sure that more than one color is represented, because if you get to country and only then discover that every item of clothing you own is blue, everyone will make a lot of fun of you. All the time.

This one's for Heather

Heather never got to see my bike, because I didn't post any pictures of it before hand. So you probably didn't even know how well my awesome new water bottle would match! If you look really closely and remember really hard, you'll be able to. I tell you what, I'm probably the cutest thing on two wheels out here!

Lots of Pictures

This was Koury community fishing day.

My fancy host mama in her fancy outfit. I loved this one, and she was tickled that I wanted to photograph her in it. Notice the two lights in the background. One is hooked up to the town electric lines, which run most of the evenings, and one is solar. There is a solar panel on the roof. I guess its a hold over from when there was no electricity in town. I have never seen it on, but once my host father was around, and they watched soap operas off of the solar all day.

Our beautiful garden!

This is my home. If you look really closely you can see my bike and my door behind the tree. The mango is where we sit, because it is the only shade we have that is not on concrete. We have a concrete porch! But concrete gets really, really hot. We usually have lunch under the mango, too. Except right now the harmeton is blowing, which is wind from the Sahara, so we try to shelter ourselves from the sandy wind a little.

I love this old man, and I love his hats! I love this one best. When I asked him if I could take his hat's picture, he laughed until he left.

This is Ismael's papaya. He is very conscientious about watering. He really likes growing things. Things that he can eat and things that he can sell.

Ismael (left), Zumana (right) at our house. This is kind of how they are!

They used to sleep all snuggled up together like this most of the time. This was pretty funny, because they kept sliding down, or one would slide down and pull the other with it, and then they'd sleepily clamber back up.
The cats are angry, angry, angry in this picture, because they just got a bath.

This is my favorite billboard in Mali. Maybe we need some of these in America.

In Memorium

Well, bad news Burkina Fasofe. Little Hal seems to have eaten a poison frog and succumbed. I think its a bad day when your cat dies anyway, but maybe its a worse day when your cat dies in Mali. And he made horrible dying noises, and there was zero sympathy for him or me, and the only thing that people said is, why are you so upset, there are lots of other cats? Quick body removal, and I think the little girl cat doesn’t know he’s dead and is looking for him. She keeps climbing up on me and howling really loudly in my face. Poor baby.

By the way, that's not him dead, that's him when he was waking up from a nap and rolling off of my bed.