A Few Random Thoughts

Apr 4, 2009 – It’s Saturday morning and I just got back from my fifth and final anti rabies shot. For you oldies out there, the shots are in the arm, not the stomach like we heard of when we were kids.

It’s a glorious morning and not too hot yet, but it is not 10 am yet and we aren’t out in the sun. It has rained heavily the last 3 of 4 nights. Heavy enough to actually leave mud on the roads. A welcome sight for people here as they need to get the crops growing. It’s late in coming, hopefully it will continue. There has already been a couple false starts this season. Unlike the Oregon downpours these are in the form of thunder storms, huge thunderstorms relative to what I’m use to.

One comic thing to us here are how the motorbike drivers dress. A lot of them wear heavy jackets and caps, sometimes even gloves. Ski suits are not that uncommon. The most comic are the drivers with chest protectors. At least that is what they look like. Usually a bright florescent color, lime green or neon orange. My guess would be softball varieties and not high end. Not sure why they wear them, maybe a fashion statement.

The rains bring out moving meals for the gathering. Walking down the roads you see bands of kids scurrying about with pails and bowls gathering tasty creepy crawlies. They say they are best fried, but they’ll eat them raw and live, after pulling the wings off. According to the kids, these are flying insects that burrow into the ground, shed their wings and come out as a crawly bug. So there are hundreds of thousands of the wings all over the ground. They don’t create a solid cover, but you still wonder where they all come from and can there really be that many bugs around to drop them all. See the pics of these at http://picasaweb.google.com/MaiersInAfrica.

I can across a note I made a year ago after our cruise – I weighed 215 pounds. That’s 40 pounds more than I am now. I should market this Mbita diet, I could make a fortune.

We were just down at the lake with the kids, the last swimming safari. Morgan is in town for the weekend to say goodbye to the kids. We walked down to their main hangout by Father’s and Uncle’s place and soon had found most of the gang. We headed off through the parish to gather the last couple. We cut through the back way so not to draw a unwanted crowd of kids and sent a couple by the church to round up the last couple.

Byron was there. Poor kid, he has a chronic ear infection, often with quantities of white puss flowing out to the point of dripping. We have noticed this every since we first got here. Anyway, he had a great time playing with Morgan in the water, floating and splashing and having a great smile on his face. After a while and sat on the dock with Joyce. After he dried she tried a few times to get his cloths back on him, which he would have none of. None of that is until Morgan started putting her cloths on, then he was fine with it.

The best pictures don’t get caught on camera. This is for a variety of reasons, not having the camera with you, not being quick enough to get it out or getting pointed and focused, it not being an appropriate place or time or as today, the battery running out. We often talk of needed an eye-cam, where you can just blink and record the shot. Missed some good ones today – he bike driver in his winter cost – wearing it backwards for some reason Morgan burying kids in the sand and making mermaids out of them. Kids running and flipping into the water. The fisherman whacking the mostly dead fish with a 1x3.

We had spotted a fish 10 yards off the dock. Couldn’t figure it out at first, but then realized that a fish was floating on its side with his fin sticking into the air. Occasionally it would flap. I pointed it out and the kids took out after it. The first time they moved to swiftly and it dove under the water. It surfaced a moment later and the next attempt they approached more slowly and Magdalene got a hand on it before it submerged. On the third try the fisherman shooed the kids off and took out after the semi-dead fish in his boat. He paddled up next to it, grabbed his 1x3 stick and whacked it, knocking it under the surface again. He waited another moment for it to resurface and then scooped it up with a bucket. Think of the lucky person that gets to have this prime Lake Victoria tilapia for dinner.

Time to go work on pictures. I’ve been shooting birds again, which means a few hundred shots to go through for a very few good ones.

Reporting from Mbita,
Paul