Does the Geek Squad make house calls to Guinea?

Ugh - my computer crapped out today. I think something might have gone awry with the electricity. It won’t turn on now. So blog entries likely to be shorter - and perhaps comprised of photos of what I write by hand.

We have done lots of driving around, and i am not quick enough or close enough to take photos of some wonderful things. So here are my verbal photographs from a few rides:

• Lady in a beautiful chartreuse dress, off the shoulders, flaired peplin, fitted at the waist, hemmed at her ankles. Rich chocolate skin. Climbed onto the back of a motorbike. I don’t know how. She was 100% elegant on and off the bike.

• . Chickens and ducks, goats and sheep, cows all wandering around. Ahmadou says they know their way home. They seem kind of like pedestrians, merging with other foot traffic.

• No bicycles (a difficult thing to photograph)

• Tough looking 8 year old walking down the street. Hands in pockets. Scowl. Wearing a wife beater undershirt. Backwards.

• scaffolding on 4-5 story buildings made out of 3-inch diameter branches and tree trunks. Couldn’t see how they were fastened

• Teens who wisely set up their kiosk of selling windshield wiper blades and boxes of Kleenex where there is a large speed bump in the road; everyone has to slow down for them

• The rain was literally roaring last night. I got up at 4am to watch it.

• Many of the roofs are made out of orange tile. A lot of the corrugated metal roofs are orange, too. Triangles, squares, rectangles of orange against a hillside of lush green. It is a Cezanne landscape.

• The earth here is red clay. The puddles are bright orange. A memory that might be in my toes, is not quite in my brain, of the orange puddles and red clay I discovered when we moved from Iowa to Georgia when I was 5

• In the back part of a parking lot, nosing through a pile of trash are 8 baby pigs. Pigs! How does this make sense in a Muslim country? I asked Ahmadou’s brother what they were and he said “boef.” Boef my ass. What are those pigs doing here?

And so many more. Today, I got to hold a two-week baby girl. Her mom is coming to our teacher training. I got to hold the baby a good chunk of the morning. The sweetest.

Love and light

PS: thanks for the comments! I love seeing them.