A Change of Seasons

The "cold season" has come. Which means nothing more than sometimes you need a blanket at night, and you don't sweat as much during the day. I'm learning to judge the temperature by the amount that I sweat, but I have no idea what the actual temperature is. I've been told that it gets below a frigid 75 degrees now at night. My scale is as follows: it's either really (explicitly) hot, really hot, hot, pretty hot, warm, and kind of warm. I refuse to add cold to my temperature scale. The next time a Gambian tells me that it's cold I'll bring them to North Dakota for a winter and expose them to -60 windchill. I saw someone wearing something similar to a heavy North Face down coat the other day when it was around 75 degrees. After I leave here, I will have experienced all the extremities and ridiculousness temperature has to offer.

If there's any truth in the saying "you are what you eat," I will soon become a giant piece of rice with limbs made of peanuts. I'm amazed at the amount of rice I'm tolerating. It's pretty good actually, and there's so many different ways of preparing it. The food is a bit more spicy and flavourful here than I expected it would be. I haven't grown tired yet of freshly roasted peanuts (formerly a good cash crop here until the groundnut price plummeted) either. I had a fever of around 102.5 the other night, and all I had the desire to eat was tomato soup and grilled cheese from our old fraternity cook Lorraine (pictured/immortalized on the internet), or of course chicken noodle soup from my mother (sorry, no picture). I definitely haven't lost my taste for American snacks. I devoured the enormous care package my mom sent me with shocking, disgusting, and obesity-like ease. I nearly felt ashamed of myself upon looking in an empty box on Day 3 of my castaway-esque eating binge. I definitely eat plenty here though; don't be surprised if I come back from Africa weighing more. Who gains weight in Africa? I do.

Two weeks ago, night classes started for all the students here. I think the schedule they have now is borderline insane. They go to school from 8 A.M. to 3 P.M., and then they come back at 5 P.M. and stay until 11 P.M. for mandatory studying. Could you imagine that in the U.S.? I don't even think I put that much effort into my college degree. 96.1% of the students last spring failed the English portion of the West African Exam, so this is their solution. It was about the same for Math and Science. None of the students study at home, and some of the parents even forbid their children to study at home, so many people think this is the best way. The importance of high school hasn't quite made it's way into the culture here yet, but many more families are stressing it's importance now than previously. Many students will end up working in their families' fields after they graduate.

I started night classes last week for students that wanted to learn to use the internet. It's going to take a lonnnggg time for everyone to use the internet. I only have 5 computers set up for the internet, there's about 50 students in each class, and I have 5 classes. I take 10 students at a time for 1 hour and that will be the extent of their internet time for 3 weeks, and then they will get another chance when the rotation starts over. My night classes haven't had a very good start. There hasn't been internet here or most of the country for about a week. I tried explaining that if that ever happened in the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost, but I don't know how well they grasped that.