Picture Me Walkin'

We did our second big trash cleanup in town on Saturday. It was pretty awesome really. It got off to a rocky start, and looked like the 10 of us might be cleaning up trash on our own. By like 9am we were sitting in the shade in the center of town plotting our excuses to ditch out. I've gotten pretty extreme double takes before, but the 10 of us sitting in the shade of the clock tower at the town center in matching t-shirts got something on a different level entirely. I think the rough equivalent at home would be if you saw a fleet of porpoises in matching funny hats juggling flaming chainsaws in Times Square. It might attract a little crowd. At the 11th hour, my bulletproof excuse proved unnecessary, Brad called with good news. He was at CRO- Child Restoration Outreach, the organization for streetkids. He says he wrangled some manpower, so we should head over there. Manpower wasn't quite the right term I guess, probably kidpower would have been better. I walked into the compou...

I have at all costs resisted talking about my work here in Africa in any way shape or form. I guess one could take this as an admission that I don't actually do any work at all. The truth is that I actually work reasonably hard- certainly not as hard as if I were in the US getting paid, but harder than my neighbors or any of the government people we interact with. There are a couple reasons I don't talk much about the work: (1) I think it's unprofessional (and I'm nothing if not a consummate professional and model worker bee at all times) and (2) the nature of community work and working in Africa in general is that its incredibly frustrating and seemingly pointless on a day to day basis. Nothing works as planned and everything reverts to chaos, especially when working with the community. I could easily fill pages and pages with bitching about broken appointments and the minutia of my day, but that would be neither fun to read nor to write- so what's the point. L...