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Saturday, January 16, 1977, 8:00 pm - Day 354
Writing about an oven yesterday started me off on actually getting an oven fixed up. It was finished yesterday, and only took an hour or so to do. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks like it would work. It looks something like this, and the main body consists of an old bowl that I found with its bottom missing. This fits nicely ontop of my stove. The next part is a small old lid, which I put slots on the side of, which goes on the bottom of the bowl to spread the heat out uniformly along the sides. My cooking pan will have a few inches of heated air all around it, so it should make a pretty good stove.
I went out today and bought a mouse trap. For the past couple of weeks I have had a mouse as a roommate. He sleeps "in" my bed while I only sleep on top of my bed. The mattress that I have has springs built into it, which leaves alot of empty space inside it. The bottom of the mattress has a big hole in it, and this is where the mouse gets in. While I might even be on the bed trying to sleep, this mouse gets inside and runs around in there, making all kinds of racket, and sometimes even munching. I catch a glimpse of him running around in my room every so often, and once even got a good close-up look at him. He seems to be about 3 inches long (not counting the tail) and about an inch wide. He has big ears which stick up over his head. I think he has grown since I first saw him. I've gotten pretty used to him now, mostly because I am now convinced that he is unable to get onto the top of my bed from where he lives inside my bed. He is a fast little bugger, much too fast for me, so I have had to just put up with him for these past two weeks, waiting for the first time that I could get a mousetrap. He is going to step into my trap sooner or later, even though he is a clever little devil.
Sunday, January 16, 1977, 10:00 am - Day 355
I just finished baking a cake, and I have biscuits in the oven now. The cake came out perfect, so now I am sure that the oven works. I am not sure how the cake will taste, because I didn't have any eggs and I didn't have any sugar either. I did have one big chocolate bar which I melted and put in the cake. I put in more than what the recipe called for, in hopes that it will make up for some of the sugar that I left out. I don't have anything to make frosting, either, but it doesn't matter - I will eat it anyway. The only problem that I have to watch with the stove is to be sure that it doesn't smoke. If it does, then the smoke goes into the oven and makes the food taste like kerosene. This happened with my biscuits. But I am eating them anyway. They taste ok, if you can block out the smell of kerosene smoke in your mind.
Sunday, January 16, 1977, 1:00 pm - Day 355
Well, I did it! I finally cut my hair. It went from about 5 inches long, down to about 2 inches. It doesn't look too bad from the front, and I hope that the back is ok also, but I can't really tell. What I did, basicly, was to take the top layer off all around. It is a blondish red color where it has been bleached by the sun. The lower layer is a darker red, because the sun hasn't had a chance to get to it yet. It sure feels better! I have been feeling pretty grubby lately, even though I wash my hair almost every day, but it should end as soon as I take my bath and shave today. I was going to get my hair planted (braided) like the women do here, for my trip to Freetown next week, but it is probably too short to do now. I had it planted on my last day in Alikalia, and it worked pretty good for wearing my helmet. Otherwise, my hair always looked ratty after I take my helmet off.
Friday, January 21, 1977, 8:00 pm - Day 360
The past few days I have been mostly just biding my time here in Kamiendor. The surveying is finished and I will be starting on the design when I get to Freetown tomorrow. I've gone through 3 or 4 books just recently, including my first ever Perry mason Murder Mystery Novel. It was pretty good. I've made a 4" x 6" cardboard layer relief map of the Kamiendor area, which took up alot more of the time.
Yesterday, I went with a few of the ladies to the weekly market in the next village, and had a really enjoyable time. The market seems more like a fair. Everyone is there, and they all have a good time. I got to hold their bag for them.
The first half of today I spent working on my soccer ball. It has been pretty bad lately, because the leaks were getting pretty big. Finally, yesterday, I went to inflate it again and I couldn't find the nipple. It had disappeared inside the ball. This meant to me that it had an inside ball, and wasn't just the one layer that I thought it was before. I took my scissors and cut a slot about 6 inches long in the side. Sure enough, there was an inside ball (I think they call it the bladder). I took it out and patched up the holes. There were 3 places. Two of them I patched fine. The other one I patched, but it still leaked. I patched the patch, but still it leaked. I then took them back off and put on another bigger patch. I didn't try it to see if it still leaked, but put it back inside, closing the outside again with an extra boot lace. I pumped it up again and it works fine, except that it still has a slow leak. It must still be leaking from that last patch. When I get some more patches, I might try to fix it better.
Sunday, January 23, 1977, 11:00 pm - Day 362
Oh, this Freetown life! I got in yesterday and that night I had dinner at the Peace Corps director's house. Today I spent at the beach and this evening again I was a guest for dinner, this time at the Peace Corps Rural Development Officer's house. There was a reason for all of this. I know it seems hard to believe, but they were not in my honor. I just sort of tagged along.
I think that the main reason for it all is that we have a man visiting us here in Sierra Leone, and he has just been here a couple of days and he will be staying about two weeks. He is a civil engineer, a professor at the new Jersey Institute of Technology, and is going to be working with the Peace Corps in the future to help with recruiting engineers. His trip to Sierra Leone, then, is so that he can see what kind of work is being done by Peace Corps engineers, and what the various projects are. He has been the main guest at the first dinner and a couple of the other engineers and staff were there also. This dinner tonight also included two of the engineers from the Ministry of Energy and Power (my bosses), and I think that they were probably the guests of honor tonight.
Today was spent at the beach with the Peace Corps director, this engineer from New Jersey, and a few of us volunteers. Tomorrow, he (the engineer) is going up-country to check out the Daru area with all of the CARE Feeder Roads people. Next Monday, he will be coming up to my place in Kamiendor for a taste of the bush. Also coming with him will be Fred Hoyt, the volunteer leader for this project, Craig Hafner, the PC Rural Development Officer, and Curtis Stewart from the US Embassy, who is in charge of funding for self-help projects sponsored by the Embassy. All 4 of these people will spend the night in my room, sleeping on campbeds on the floor. It ought to be cozy. Maybe I can make them a cake if I can get back up to Kamiendor in time.
I got alot of mail yesterday when I arrived, which has been sitting here in Freetown waiting for me all of this time. It was mostly Christmas cards. There were 3 letters from home sent during the last part of November and the first part of December. I am supposed to have a couple of packages arrived, which I will be seeing about tomorrow. I have one note telling me to pick up a raincoat that was sent to me. The value of the raincoat was listed as $12.00, which was then converted to Le14.59, and then Le2.50 was added for some reason, to get a value of Le17.09 for the raincoat. Duty on this amount was then set at 40%, and then a few other charges were added on. Adding it all up, I will have to pay Le7.25 to get my raincoat. Oh well!, it will still be worth it to me during this next rainy season.
There is a new Peace Corps policy that they are trying out, starting for me on my next trip down to Freetown, which is that the motorcycles are to be used only on the worksite, and for trips to Freetown the volunteer is to use public transport. This will mean more inconvience and expense for me, but hopefully I could work something out which will be managable. I will probably ride the motorcycle as far as Koidu and then catch the bus from there to Freetown. It will cost about Le4.50 or Le5.00 each way for the bus, and then I will also have taxi fares to pay here in Freetown. To catch the bus in Koidu, I will probably have to leave very early in the morning, like maybe 5:00 am.
The reasoning behind this new policy is that the traffic and road conditions in and around Freetown make it unsafe to drive. I don't agree with this in that the roads up country are just as dangerous and in some cases even worse than the roads in Freetown. I agree in that I think that most of the roads in this country are potentially unsafe and that anything might possibly happen at any time. The thing that I see about this new policy is that it would equalize the volunteers with motorcycles and those without. Both groups would then be in the same boat when it came time to visit Freetown. That would be one angle of the policy, but I think that the official reason is that it is unsafe to drive motorcycles in Freetown.
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