Hello, hello!

I'm back in Basse again, and this time I prepared some posts in advance, which I will post to future days. So rather than beginning each post with, "I'm not actually in front of a computer now," assume that I am not in front of a computer unless I say otherwise.

I'm in front of a computer now.

Today instead of taking a gele into Basse, I biked. It's 42k and took me about 3 and a half hours. The ride itself wasn't too bad though because I left before the day became hot and even though it's all a dirt road, it's smooth-ish for a lot of it.

I wrote in September that I would not actually be teaching any classes at the school, so I was not worried about the first day of classes. False. I'm teaching math to the two ninth grade classes, the two eleventh grade classes, and the twelfth grade class. Some of my future posts will be about life at school, I think. I can't actually remember what all the posts I've got written in my notebook were about.

Also, I had a kitten for three days. Then it died. It was living in my site-mate's roof, where its mother had abandoned it and its three siblings. I think it was still too small to be drinking anything except its mother's milk, so the powdered milk I mixed for him just wasn't making the cut. Or possibly he died because I tempted fate and didn't wait eight days before naming him. His Gambian name was Ngiiru, or however you spell the Pulaar word for lion, and his American name was Mosquito. My host brother kept forgetting the word "cat," so a couple of times each day he would ask, "Binta, where is your mosquito?"