Why have I not been blogging away faithfully? Because I'M going to FRANCE and you're NOT. Nyah, nyah, nyah and general jeering in your direction. Well, I guess you COULD be going to France on holiday, but the probability is pretty low. I wish you were, though. It's fabulous. I know I've already blogged at length about the terrors of French, but France itself is so lovely- my favorite place on Earth and I've been around a bit.
We are leaving on Friday for six weeks. Packing is a nightmare, as you may imagine. Air France recently doubled the baggage allowance, which has made it all worse. Just the sheer volume of 240 kg of baggage is scary. (That's 528 lbs for all you non-metric folks.) Pre-upgrade, I had to just pack the minimum and it just barely fit. Now the lure of 240 kg of cargo has led me astray...games, umbrellas, extra shoes....it's positively decadent and a heck of a lot of work. It's pretty much a full-time job packing it all up and getting the house battened down against the dust. Anything we leave out in our home will be wrecked unless it's put away ot covered up. No window or door can keep that Saharan dust from creeping in. You are obliged to dust once a day here, if not twice. Everything gets covered by fine orange grit. I won't miss that while I'm in France! Lovely, green France.
I will try to get to an internet café once a week or so and blog a bit during the holiday.
The picture I've posted today is from a little trip that JP and I took Sunday. A little French town near JP's natal village is funding several projects in a very poor village to the east of Ouaga. We drove for an hour and a half over very bad roads. (I got carsick, which I never do, normally). We visited the sewing workshop that has been set up with old machines from France. Sadly, many of them are so old that nobody can find any parts to repair them. So several of the machines are unusable and the students don't get to sew much during the classes, as they must take turns. It would have been wiser to buy simple pedal-operated machines here that are easy to fix. But nobody asked the advice of the "beneficiaries". Typical African aid project.