Here it is folks, another month another blog. Except this time, instead of my usual boring stuff this one is full of all sorts of excitement like shooting a wedding (taking pictures for those who are not so hip with the camera scene), break-ins, theft, sickness, visitors from Britain and all sorts of missions related events that will keep you at the edge of your seats. I thought that after 5 months or so, life in Africa would slow down a bit and I would leave you all with nothing to read except copy and pasted information from previous blogs about my English classes but this one has all sorts of humdingerish events. (humdingerish is not a word but humdinger is… I look it up. It means remarkable or extraordinary or wild like that.)
In reality it was not terrible exciting of a time. The whole health thing just consisted of me ripping out part of my toe nail, getting a bit of malaria and having vitamin deficiency which lead to a swollen throat. What was unfortunate about it all is that it all started up within two days. Right after I sent off reports of how remarkably good my health has been so far too. I remember as I wrote it humoring myself as I wrote about my health thinking it to be bad luck. Oh well, at least each problem had a simple solution and I was back to health in less than two weeks.
The real unfortunate part of it all is that the night it was decided that I my headache was more than just a headache, my house got broken into as I was at the night gathering for church. A couple of people entered through a door my roommate forgot to lock properly, broke through my door and promptly searched for and found my electronics devices. This consisted of my laptop, both cameras and my iPod. Their unfamiliarity of these devices could be shown by the fact that they forgot to take the chargers for each one, rendering them useless after a couple hours of use.
It was interesting to note that during that same night of unfortunate events Isa (the 85 year old lady here who has been here nearly from the start), fell and broke her leg.
The next morning, as I was reporting the name brand and what not to a local from Bissau (the capital city is pretty much the only place for such electronics and even then there are only three locations where you would normally find them, at least three places where you can develop digital pictures, I never found out which was accurate. Either way, it was a promising find.) someone came into my house and told me that my laptop and my good camera had been found. Apparently those items were slightly too large to conceal and get away with.
So really, in the end I am just minus some music that I can do without and a camera that can take video (my good one cant). So it was a fairly eventful 24 hours but I got some of my stuff back so it was good. And to improve situations even more we discovered that Isa’s leg was not actually broken, it was just a bad fall. A couple days after the getting some medicine for malaria the headache was on its way out and when we discovered that the throat problem was not going away it was advised that I take some vitamins and that problem was also resolved after a few interesting days of trying to teach English with minimal speaking.
To explain my note about the British visitors I will just say that they stopped by Titus’ place for a short bit. All nine of them had children much older than I am but it was nice to have some English around the house. It was a great time and their sense of humor was much appreciated as I could finally understand some of the jokes that were being told. Another huge bonus was the extra special food being served for them meant that I got to eat like a king for a couple days. I also went on a bit of a tour with them and got to learn a few things about Ingore that had not been mentioned.
Oh ya, and I shot a wedding before all the other stuff happened. The pastors younger sister was getting married and there was nobody to take pictures so I went down with my cameras and took a whole bunch of pictures. It was a pretty rough situation as the room was super dark but flash could not be used due to the crazy amount of dust. I did manage to get a couple pictures with the help of Almamo (pretty much the most ‘western’
In the end it really was not as crazy exciting as I tried to make it in my intro, but perhaps it got you pumped up enough to finish this read. Sorry to if this was tricky to read but I wrote this while being quite pressed for time. Perhaps I will post another blog soon explaining some of the places that do not make sense and having a lot less brackets to explain things after writing them.
