Go Patriots!

I am mildly tired of writing about my projects, so I will instead give you a little anecdote for today. A few days ago, I was biking back from Toubacouta where I had been using the internet in one of the hotels there to write one of my grants. I biked through one random village, and a group of kids started yelling “Toubab!”and running after my bike. This is an entirely normal occurrence, but one kid specifically actually reached my bike and started grabbing the back of it and running with it, which really annoyed me. This again wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, but on this particular day it just irked me, and I turned around and screamed that he was a “bleepity bleep” that I will not repeat here because unlike that little kid, you will all understand what I am saying. The weird part was, the kid looked at me and shouted what I had just called him right back at me, not knowing what he was saying. Hearing that little kid say it was a little jarring and sort of brought me back, but I still needed to get him off my bike, so I sped up as much as I could and eventually he let go, but it still just reminded me how difficult of a situation you can be put in when you’re a complete outsider. Things like that never occur in my village because everyone there is used to me and knows my name, but the problem with being here is that you don’t just sit in your village forever; you have to travel on occasion and go to places where people don’t know your name. Everyone has a way of dealing with it, but some days you just lose it.

In other news, in case you are as disconnected from the world as I sometimes find myself, today is the superbowl. I will not be watching it in real-time, but being a Patriots fan I cannot reasonably let it go without doing anything, so a group of us are getting together at a hotel and watching a recorded version of it tomorrow night. If I were to watch it when its happening, that would mean kickoff would be about 3 am, and for someone who’s been passed out at 9 pm every night, that’s a little past my bedtime. Therefore, I will not be in contact with anybody back home tomorrow until I actually watch the game. The funny part is that it’s really not that hard to disconnect from the world and not spoil it when you’re in a village in Africa. I can guarantee you that nobody in my village will come up to me at any point and say “can you believe he made that field goal?” It just won’t happen.

So on that note, I am signing off until after I am back up to date with you all and we can chat about it.

Go Patriots!

~E