Basketball, Farming and Class

It seems like all I've done for the past couple of weeks are basketball, farming and class. To be honest, these past couple of weeks have been some of the busiest since I've been out here. Through the busyness, it has been a great time to meet a lot of people. I've had a group of friends from Oklahoma come out to teach basketball clinics and play in a few exhibition games. They ended up being one player short, which meant that I had to play. I'm starting to realize that I'm getting too old to schedule five basketball games on top of everything else I have to do in a given week. So I'm planning on taking a little bit of down time next week and trying to recuperate a little bit.

On top of basketball I've been doing a lot with our corn test plots. My roommate and I have spent a weekend out in a village with a farmer that lives all by himself. His wife was killed a few years back in a landslide, and he doesn't have any other family in the area. His daughter used to 'go out' a lot, but her husband didn't like it so he would beat her. Eventually he got drunk and broke her leg and now she walks with a very bad limp. I have seen her once, but because of everything they have moved to another village and now the man lives all by himself with no family around. One of the great benefits of our corn test plots is that I have a chance to go out and spend time with this guy. We also have finally gotten all five of our test plots in the ground; so no more corn planting! The next thing that we are about to do is coffee. We're going to try and get the seedlings this upcoming week so that we'll have everything ready to plant before the end of the month. We have everything lined up, but knowing things out here there will probably be setbacks.

The other thing that has been going on is a huge school performance. Our school is trying to become a university instead of just a teacher training college, so they are in the middle of the accreditation process. You would think that would mean most of the process would be based on academics and things like that, but somehow the major factor in the school becoming accredited is a performance in front of the officials. Because everyone thinks it is great that a foreigner can speak the local language, a few others and myself got up and sang in traditional clothing in front of the entire school. It was kind of fun, but I am glad to be finished with it. It earned me some major points with the local officials though.