new kitty and other critters

 We got a new kitty!  It's been over 2 years since the cat we used to have ran away.  All of our chickens with their food and eggs are mouse and rat (and shrew) magnets, so it seems like we could use some help with that.  We got this cute little boy kitten and I am calling him "Scout" but I'm not sure if the name is going to stick yet because JP keeps saying "Scoot."

Here is my boy, Teddy, my trusty dog.  He is pretty nice with the kitten so far unless the kitten comes near Teddy's food and then he growls.  He was good buddies with our last cat, so I hope they can develop a friendship.

 

We have a whole bunch of chickens.  There are 2 boxes for chicks and the bigger chickens are all over the yard during the day and in their coops at night.

 

 

teaching 7th grade English

I've completed (or managed to live through!) the first 4 weeks of the school year.  Last year I taught 9th grade English, so it is a bit of a change to teach 7th graders this year.  Last year there were 40 students in my class, this year there are 57.  Yikes!  So it is definately a challenge to try to learn their names.  My friend offered to print out a photo of each student.  You can see a sample of those here:

So now I have a little card of each student, and I had them hold their names in the pictures. These are kind of like mug shots!  The names are supposed to be put on their desk each time for English class.  I said that in December if they still have their name paper they can give it back to me in exchange for a piece of candy.  I hope I can learn the names by then!  At the end of the school year I will give each student their picture to keep.
Even though there are a lot more students in one class, so far I like 7th grade teaching better than 9th grade.  I enjoy teaching beginners the most.  Also, the 7th graders are more enthusiastic and responsive to some of my ideas, like singing or being dramatic in reading or acting out dialogues.  Sometimes it seemed like the 9th graders were just rolling their eyes and making fun of me behind my back.
So far they've learned a bit of beginning English, and they've learned not to all get up and run shouting and pushing to the door at the end of class to go out to their snack/recreation time. (Imagine 57 13 year olds doing that!)  They sit quietly in their desks and then I let one row go calmly at a time.
So I do see some progress already!  I hope it will be a good year.

duckies

Here is our duck family (and my favorite rooster behind them.)  We've had the mama and papa duck for over a year, but only had 3 babies hatch so far.  The duck that is standing in the picture is the one baby that survived.  I'm hoping that the mama duck will start laying eggs again soon. When I did some research online about ducks I learned that the kind of ducks we have, the kind that is mostly found here, is Muscovy ducks.

the car we bought

Here it is!  Our new car!  Our dog is still checking it out, but we're very happy with it. :)
It's a 2012 Toyota Highlander Limited, V6, 4WD, dark grey color, with good air conditioning and one of those cameras for backing up. Pretty great.

getting home from Togo

  It was a long trip for us to get home from Togo.  It took us 6 days, but it took the car 7 days!  The travel to get to Lome on the bus took 31 hours, and the driving time in the car was 28 hours, it was just split up over all those days.

 

We passed through some towns and villages, but mostly saw a lot of this (above) - crop fields and nothing.  It is still rainy season, so everything is beautifully green and there isn't so much dust, so that was a plus.

This is the "Pyramid" in BoboDioulasso, Burkina Faso, but I see a Christmas tree!

We waited in this lot for 11 hours, mostly sitting in the car.

Here is what it was like:

Day 1: We couldn't leave from Lome early in the morning as we had hoped.  We actually had to wait there an extra day before leaving for the paperwork to be done to get the car out of the port.  We finally left at 1:15 on Thursday afternoon.  We drove until 10pm, which wasn't great because that meant 4 hours of driving after the sun set, but we needed to get to a friend's house to spend the night.

Day 2:  JP took the car to our friend's mechanic to get a few things looked at in the morning, so we didn't leave until after lunch.  We got to the border at the top of Togo to enter Burkina, and the Burkina side said that we couldn't pass until the next day.  We had to leave the car in the customs parking lot, ride on motorcycle taxis with our suitcases to a crummy hotel, and spend the night there.

Day 3:  We sat in the car in the lot from 9-1 waiting for them to let us leave.  Then we drove until we got to Ouagadougou around sunset.  There we were able to stay overnight at a very nice mission guesthouse.

Day 4:  We drove from Ouaga to Bobo, only about 5 hours.  Then we stayed in another nice mission guesthouse for 2 nights because Monday was Tabaski, the biggest Muslim holiday of the year, so we couldn't cross the border to get home then. 

Day 5:  Just hanging out in Bobo waiting.  I bought some vegetables from a lady who brought them to the guesthouse.  I joked that I suddenly knew a new language because I talked with her in Bambara, but she speaks "Jula" which is very similar to Bambara but the Burkina Faso dialect of the trade language of the region.

Day 6:  We left Bobo and got to the border at 10:30.  We had to go through formalaties and pay some taxes to exit Burkina, that took about 45 minutes.  Then we had to go through formalaties to enter Mali.  At the Mali customs office they had us park the car in the lot and come in the office.  They looked at the papers we had and there was a guy who said we needed him to file papers there for us and he asked for $150.  I don't like that there aren't set prices for things, it's just whatever the guy can get out of us, but there is no choice but to have him file papers for us.
JP negotiated down to $100.  The guy left and said that he would get the stuff taken care of but that we'd have to wait until about 4pm because people go home for lunch break, so it would be done after that.  At 4 he told us that it would be done at 6.  At 6 he said that it'd be done the next afternoon.  Some guy in the capital hadn't showed up to work and so  his bit of the paperwork wasn't done. I was not impressed.  We were so close to home, and we'd already been waiting for a long time with nothing to do and nothing to eat.  JP had found some grilled meat to eat out in the street, but I don't eat meat, and there was nothing else.  Things weren't open and ladies weren't cooking because it was the day after the holiday and everyone was still in holiday mode and they probably had lots of leftover sheep meat from the day before.  We had some dried mangoes, so we ate those, but that wasn't really a meal.
There were no hotels to go to and we didn't want to sleep in the car in a parking lot with no bathroom.  And we didn't want to spend the whole next morning waiting and wonder if the paperwork would actually be done the next afternoon.  I went and had a chat with the customs office head man, but there was nothing to be done.
So we called some friends to try to get home.  It was already dark out.  I think we called them around 7.  They were to get the key to our house from our house helper and get our old car from the garage and drive to get us. Well, they got the car and started driving but on the other end of town realized that it wouldn't make it.  The poor old car needed a trip to the mechanic.  We called a friend with a car and asked if  we could borrow it to save us.  That friend agreed, so now our friends started on the road to come and get us after switching cars and getting some gas.  This all took a lot of time, and finally it was 11pm when they arrived to rescue us.  We had been in that parking lot for 11 hours.  We arrived home exhausted at 1am.

Day 7:  JP called and was told he could get the car, so he went and got a bus ticket and took a bus to the place where the car was.  He got back home at about 7pm.

Now we're glad to all be home!  We still have some taxes to finish paying and other paperwork to do to be done, but the hardest part is behind us.

my car thoughts and thankfulness

I got my driver’s license a few days after my 16^th birthday, and my first car a few weeks after that.  My first car was not very nice, but it was mine!  It meant independence and freedom and going places! 
Between ages 16 and 28 I owned 6 different cars, each one nicer than the last.  I seem to remember that my mom bought the first car; I think it cost $500.  But after that I paid for the cars myself with money from hard work.
And then I moved to Mali… and that meant making certain sacrifices. 

For my first year my means of transportation was my feet.  Sometimes I could borrow a motorbike from a friend.  For trips to the capital I took the bus.  All this was fine and I lived where I worked so it wasn’t really that difficult, but I missed the freedom and independence that owning a car gives.

Then JP and I were able to buy a motorcycle!  We were so excited and thankful to have a way to zoom around town.  Long trips were still on the bus.  For 4 years our motorcycle was our way of getting around.

Then for the past year or so we have had a car.  What a game changer!  It has belonged to 4 different expats in Mali and we were able to buy it inexpensively.  It is 20 years old and has to visit the mechanic pretty often, but we have been so glad to have a car.  We’ve been able to haul things around that would be pretty impossible with the motorcycle, and we’ve made several trips to Bamako without suffering on the bus.

Now we are so blessed to have our new car!  I think that because we went without a car for 5 years we are much more appreciative than if we had had a car all along. 
We are very conscious that this isn’t something that we deserve or have earned. We made a big effort to fundraise for a car last time we were in the states.  So many people were generous to give money for our car fund.  
We were able to get a car that is nicer and newer than we imagined we might be able to buy.  We will be able to drive on terrible rough roads with much more confidence now and not worry about breaking down in the middle of nowhere.  And the new car has good air conditioning!  It is only 5 years old, so hopefully we won’t see the mechanic on a regular basis anymore. I could ramble on some more, but suffice it to say that we are overjoyed and profoundly grateful.

buying a car in Togo

What an adventure! Today is our last day in Togo.  We thought we'd already be on the road by now, but paperwork takes longer than it seems like it should.  We are supposed to be able to get the car we bought out of the port tomorrow morning.  Then we'll have 3 days of driving to get home.  The sun sets at about 6pm, and it isn't safe to drive after dark, so we only have a limited amount of sunlight to drive in each day.  Which is fine with me, I think 10 or 12 hours a day in a car on African roads is plenty!

Here (above) you can seem some containers and cranes in the shipping port.  This is not where we looked at cars, the car lots are just next to here.

 

 There is every kind of car imaginable all crowed together and mixed up in the port lots.  We had a Togolese friend come to help us in the confusion, and he had 2 guys who work in the lots come with us, so we had a bit of an entourage as we went looking at cars.  Originally JP had said he thought I should stay at the hotel when he went out to look, but I was glad he changed his mind so I could come with.  We already knew what kind of car we were hoping to get, so the other guys had already scoped out what was available.  They had a list of the cars with thier prices and details, like V4 or V6, and colors.  So we only really looked at a few cars and we found the one we wanted pretty quickly. 

 Our car is front and center, there is a guy with a yellow "hat" doing something to the rear passenger door.  They had taken all the seats and everything out of the car when it arrived in port, so then they had to get it all put back together.

We fundraised for a car when we were in the states in 2014/15 and we are so blessed by the financial contributions of many people to our car fund.  We were able to get a better and newer car than we imagined we would be able to buy!  May it run well for many many years to come!

(Below) The seller is sitting at his desk and next to him is 3 stacks of money.  I think it's ridiculous that we would pay for a car in cash like this.  It's a car, not drugs or guns.  I don't think it's smart to go around town with a backpack containing thousands of dollars of cash! But that's how it's done.  I guess a bank transfer would take 5 days to process.  We already have to wait for other paperwork to process, we don't need more wait time!
It took several hours of running around to banks and waiting to get the cash out of our account. JP had already talked to the bank in Mali before we left saying that we'd want to get money from a branch in Togo.  But the first bank branch in Togo didn't know what they were doing, and JP had to call to Mali, and go back to the bank, and then get sent to the bank headquarters downtown.  Then there was a lot of sitting and waiting, like maybe they had to count all that cash several times.  The largest bill here is like a $20, so it takes a big stack to buy a car!

Anyway, we did buy a car! Hooray!  But we don't really have it yet.  Boo!
So, better pictures and more about the car are to come once we actually get the car off the port lot!