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Wednesday, March 17, 1976, 6:00 am - Day 50
I might not have amoebas after all. I have felt fine for the last few days. My temperature has been holding around 97.4F but this morning I took it and it was 96.7F. That is almost 2 degrees below normal but I seem to feel alright so I don't know if it is a sign of something wrong. I found out yesterday that I have tumba flies for sure. Tumba flies like to lay eggs in wet clothing and when the eggs hatch the larvae penetrate your skin and form a big pimple or small boil. To get rid of them you have to put gasoline or grease on the spot and hope they come out, then pull them out with tweezers. It can be painfull having tumba flies, and trying to get rid of them hurts also. The way to prevent them is to iron all clothing. I got mine from wearing the same pair of jeans for about 3 days. I think 2 days will be my limit from now on.
I am really getting into my job as culvert engineer over here now. Instead of staying with one crew all day like I was doing last week, I am now moving around, checking on all of them, seeing that they are doing it right and that they have all of the tools and materials. I am also making the decisions on culvert location and design. At least yesterday and maybe the day before I have found that I was doing alot more talking than I usually do, and yesterday I think would be my record for most talking for one day. My Krio is doing fine also. I can sit there and talk to my supervisor in Krio and be able to say what I want and have it be understood. Also, when I got back to the house I found myself not being able to shut up and part of it might be that so many things are happening that I want to tell about.
Wednesday, March 17, 1976, 10:00 pm - Day 50
Yesterday and today I have come to a point in my stay here in Sierra Leone where I can honestly say and be able to speak from experience that I do not like hot pepper! and the more I think about it, the more I hate it. The last two days the rice that I was supposed to eat for lunch had so much pepper that I could only take that first bite and then I needed a lot of water and could not bring myself to take another bite. I am also getting disgusted at people who keep telling me that I will learn to love it and will want to put it on everything after awile. I have been here for about 7 weeks so far and have had rice with pepper once or twice for each of those days and I have not yet begun to like it.
I started out not sure of the rice, then I got to tolerate it, and sometimes even enjoy it. But now I can't stand the sight of it. I would almost rather go without eating than have rice at the moment. All I've got to look forward to is two more years of eating rice twice a day and it is going to be tough to tolerate.
I think I have conquered the tumba fly epidemic. There were 8 of them on my upper leg yesterday when I tried to get rid of them. this night they all looked better and I think I was able to clean out the remainder of them. the places are still red but the bumps are gone and so is the pain.
I was taking my temperature again tonight but this time I left the thermometer in for about 15 minutes. It came out exactly 98.6F. I'm normal! I don't know if my temperature was really low the past few days or if I was using the thermometer wrong. I was leaving it in for 2 minutes before, which I think should have been plenty.
Working on the road out in Biawala is really putting a strain on my body. The trip out there takes 45 minutes each way. then my supervisor seems to expect me to be around as long as he does, and he works 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. He makes me feel like I am sluffing off and not doing my job when I try to leave at a reasonable hour. I would like to leave by 4:00 but I usually end up not leaving until 5:30 or 6:00. After the ride home, there is no energy left in me, and I then have to drag myself through the evening. I would never be able to keep this up 7 days a week and so every weekend I plan to stay home weather he is working or not.
Thursday, March 18, 1976, 10:00 pm - Day 51
The bugs are starting to come out finally. The bugs have not been a problem for me in Sierra Leone so far, but things are starting to change. During lunch in the field I find myself having to wave the flies away every so often. A week ago there weren't any flies around. this evening I lit a candle in the front room of our house with all of the windows open, and within minutes the place was full of a couple hundred small flying bugs. They were crawling all over the tabletop and were commiting suicide by flying into the flame and then getting stuck in the wax. After awhile the whole top of the candle was afire with burning bodies. Finally most of the bugs were consumed by the candle. the mosquitos still haven't come out in force yet, and hopefully they won't.
Sunday, March 21, 1976, 10:00 pm - Day 54
We are back to very few bugs now. We have been for the last few days. Friday night we had bugs again. This time they were the larger flying insects that some of the people over here like to eat. they would catch them and toss them in a cup of water and later cook and eat them. These kinds of bugs also have a problem. When they run into something their wings tend to fall off and then they have to spend the rest of their lives crawling around on the ground.
Today was a very busy, but lovely, day for me. At 8:00 this morning I got out a pick, two shovels, and two buckets to level my proposed volleyball court. Before long all of the young boys from the neighborhood were over. They started helping me without even a hint about how much I might pay them. The fact is, they were helping me because they wanted to help me and not because of what they might get out of it. We worked in the morning and then we stopped for the heat of the day, and then began again at 4:00. Altogether we worked about 5 hours, but we finally got it leveled out and it looks pretty good now. Next Sunday we will dig gutters around the edges and put a slope to the court itself to keep water from settling on it. Also, I have done about 8.5 feet on my volleyball net so far. I miscalculated on the amount of string I willneed. I thought it would take 500 feet to do, but now it looks like it would need about 700 ft to make a 25 ft net. But at only half a cent per foot it isn't too bad.
We let kids in the house for the first time today. they had a good time looking at our magazines and playing our games. They thought that some of the people in the magazines were some of us, and we didn't disagree with them. So now we have a magazine with a picture of one of the other volunteers and his father and the kids had a good time showing it to all of the other kids that stopped in.
We had the checker board out and all of the kids knew what it was. They play checkers here but they have a different name for it, Drafts, and the allowable moves for the checkers and kings are a little more lienient than our rules. The game is set up the same. The checkers can only move forward as in how we play it. But when it comes to jumping we get the first variation. The checkers can jump both forward and backward also. The way the kings move will leave you dumbfounded when you first see it. they move diagonally both forward and back the same as we play it but they can just about go as many squares as they want. If the diagonal is open and you have a checker on it and I have my king, then I can jump you so long as I can land somewhere on the other side of you. The peices can also do multiple jumps just like how we play. They play that you have to jump if you can and if you fail to, then the other person can point it out and then remove your piece that was supposed to jump. In jumping, they often don't bother to jump each piece one at a time. If they were jumping two or three checkers they often just take there piece and move it to where it would end up and pick up all of the checkers that it theoretically jumped, leaving his opponent to figure out what he did. they also like to play very fast, and a game usually only lasts a couple of minutes. Most games here are played with wooden checkers on wooden boards, and they like to play with enthusiasm, so that it is usually easy to know that a game is in progress by the rapid sound of the checkers being slammed down on the board.
At the end of the work we went down to the river and all washed up. I really needed it. I was wearing my cutoffs and I was pretty sweaty. My part of the work was mostly hauling the buckets of dirt and so I would carry them while they leaned against my legs. The result was that my legs ended up solid mud clear down to the tops of my socks. after we got cleaned up I took them all over to the store and bought two rounds of cokes for them. this was really a treat for them because even though they have coke over here, it costs 25 cents a bottle, and these kids don't have that kind of money to spend on a luxury item like coke. The two cokes each was all that I ended up paying for a full day's work from each of them, and they weren't even expecting that. They will all be back next Sunday to finish the job because they like to feel a part of us, because we are something that they can show off to their friends.
There were two projects going on today at our house. The other was a crew of workers putting in a culvert in the ditch in front of our house so that we can get the motorcycles across without going through the yard next door, which is what we do now.
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