some things

Here's some random things about rural Africa that are unexpectedly familiar.

There are fireflies here.
Well. There are fluorescent bugs. While they occasionally fly, unlike their American counterparts they usually just hang out in the overgrown grass and glow. If you shine a blinking flashlight at them you can get them pretty excited.

They have avacodos here.
who knew? In the US one often forgets that in the real world agricultural goods are only available seasonally. I think we're just getting to avacodo time here. This past week when we were in Manukrom, a small village in our cluster, for an Antenatal Care outreach session, the villagers were kind enough to provide us with a meal (cocoa-yam leaf soup and boiled plantains -- one of my favorites so far) and some avacodos to take away. And I only became slightly ill the next day. I don't think it was from the village food, actually. Regardless, once my stomach had settled yesterday evening I made myself some homemade guacamole. Most everything else you might need (except cilantro) is easily available - tomatoes, onion, garlic. Put it on some bread and call it a meal! I did, and it was amazing.

When I actually make myself go running, I'm glad I went.
It's been hard here, sometimes, to find time to go running. Days here start early, and rarely end before sundown (which is around 630). I've haven't yet become foolhardy enough to go running at night. Sometimes if I'm in the office on a day when I know there will be evening blackout, I go home to take a long lunch and a run and return with the plan to stay late and enjoy the office generator's power. And while I've never been wont to run in the morning, I'm well enough rested here that I usually wake up before my alarm anyway (again: the roosters). On a recent morning I got up at 6 for a dawn run down a muddy farmer's trail through misty, forested hillsides. I was rewarded, as always here, with zen moments in dense dripping jungle, vistas from maize-covered hilltops and the sleepy looks of utterly confused villagers.

Coke tastes the same here.
As we know they formulate it differently for each country. But here it tastes the same, at least to my palate. There is no diet soda, of course, because why would you pay for a soft drink that has no sugar in it? Which is not to say that there isn't a need for it -- there is small but definitely present obese subpopulation here. A nutritionist in the project was telling me about the Nutrition Transition: as soon as a poor population accumulates a bit of disposable income they switch from micronutrient poor staple foods (here yam, cassave and maize) to highly processed foods which are equally poor nutritionally. I haven't seen a McDonald's yet, but I'm sure it'll appear as soon as the market.

hmmm. That's all I have for now. More soon.

Also, this weekend I decided to stay in Manso Nkwanta, and I discovered the wonders of GarageBand, the audio editing program that comes with Mac OS. Definitely some lo-fi productions underway.