le 10 decembre

Wow, I cannnot believe this is the last note from language immersion. It's actually over?

Today

I have...
- eaten plain pasta with some spices for breakfast, plain rice with some spices for lunch. Dinner normal (woohoo)
- back to run/ calesthenics this morning. That's what I'm talking about.
- wondered if I'm getting carpal tunnel (haha, from writing so much?)
- noted again how Zarma does not have a unique word for love. "Ba" means to like, to want, to love, to be better than and other non verb meanings. English has one word for love and it is often noted how this is not enough. Was it Greek that had (or still has?) three? And Sanscrit had many perhaps?
- between yesterday and today heard two songs on another trainee's iPod that I very much associate with home or specific memories. It's...interesting to listen to these songs here as we get dinner ready, watch the sun set, string up our mosquito nets. I look forward to having some songs associated with Niger
- snapped a bunch of pics of this village
- (for the past two weeks) been using my leatherman to open canned vegetables! Woohoo tools!
- thought again about the parable from the bible in which Jesus says "Let the children come to me". I usually enjoy having children around, but sometimes, like when a line of 10 followers stretch behind us in the market (which is still mildly stressful enough) or when I just feel having some space and time to myself or when I just want to go for a run or do some cals without spectacle or when I'm frustrating trying to juggle studying with three books and 8 papers at once on a chair without a table outside in the wind and a few kids are just sitting around our "classroom" staring at us, I would just like to be left alone. I feel terribly guilty about this because I know it's not the right attitude. Some people really aggressively dislike the kids.

I have not...
- felt pregnant from being bloated. This is a welcome change
- have a dynamite practice LPI (the language interview/ test/ oral exam thing). Hopefully I will do better on Monday
- despite good efforts on my part, been able to feel completely at ease about language immersion ended. I want to feel very accomplished, but I didn't get to finish rewriting my notes, so....unfinished business as usual. Still plan to splurge on orange soda, fig newton things, and egg sandwiches tomorrow.

Would it be a good idea before I get a phone for you guys to send me like weekly updates of YOUR lives? Write now this "dialogue" is pretty one sided, ya?

An anecdote:
I go to the too full latrine to pee. I ask "Boro go no?" before I enter to ask if anyone is there. There is no response, so I enter. Sometimes a clay pot thing or something covers the hole, so if it is there, I remove it. I usually stay standing to pee beause it seems less nasty, even though the walls only come to shoulder or neck height. Before I finish, wiza (Zarma for "to my suprise") there is movement in the latrine hole, and a beak and then a chicken emerge from the hole, fly up to the ground level, and confusedly squawk run/ fly out of the latrine. To clarify, there was a chicken spending time IN a corner of the latrine, that is standing amidst the feces. This did not bother the chicken, but me peeing into the latrine was apparently too much to take. I was VERY glad I had not been in the squat position over the latrine at the time the chicken came up beak first. 
Can't make this stuff up.

A scene:
A little boy runs across the African landscape, with the rising son to his left on the outbound trek. The panorama buries the boy in the scenery. It is only by looking hard that we can even find him. Against the stillness of the sand, millet remains, trees, it may appear he moves fast. But he is really moving, relatively, quite slow. From the boy's perspective, time seems to move VERY slow. Though the boy is small, he projects himself into the African sky. Beyond his moving limbs, his dreams billow out beside him, behind him, and before him like clouds. He runs amidst dreams like clouds to his right and dreams like clouds to his left. In this way the boy is bigger than perception will admit. His dreams make him bigger, larger than life. Perhaps, in a way, the boy runs towards the very dreams he carries. But coming to a stop, reality sucks the air from the clouds, the body reabsorbs its dreams, and the boy is again just a little boy. The boy hopes, one day, his enduring accomplishments will replace his fleetings fantasies as extensions of himself, reaching far into the world whole as intimidating limitness as seems the African horizon on these mornings.