The past few weeks at post have been chugging along: lots of teaching classes, lots of doing end-of-the-year assessments, and lots of power outages. To decompress a bit, I went to visit my friend Caitlin in Tibati, where we relaxed and read by the lake of Tibati, and I enjoyed the most amazing Korean soup in all the land.
Meanwhile, a few anecdotes from the past week or so to catch you up:. Meiganga Attacked by Anti-Seleka Rebels β¦reads a recent local newspaper headline. Are you alive? BIR Captain Awonja shuttled Tess and I to the BIR headquarters a mile or so out of town and insisted on explaining the security situation in extreme detail to us on a giant map, with the aid of a silly laser pointer that felt hopelessly out of context.
In truth, a few warning shots were shot into the air across the border from Ngawi, a town that while located in the Mbere district of which Meiganga is the capital is still a good four hour drive on the most abysmal of dirt roads from my house.
No rebels were able to even cross the border, let alone trek the four hours to come attack my town. The bad news is the bad, inaccurate news. She went up North to her soy farm for over four months, encountered money problems there, and thus spent longer there than originally planned. She finally returned home to find that her door had been long ago broken down, and all of her things inside stolen. This was inaccurate. Poor Mama Pauli returned to her empty house last week.
When I asked her how getting settled in was going today, she told me she bought kola nuts and brought them to the mosque today as an offering, and is praying that God smites the thieves that took her things.
