It's Thursday, and here I am, procrastinating instead of writing the paper that is due tomorrow morning. I just wanted to relate the boring events of the last three days and finish with an extremely exciting yet kind of morally devastating turn of events.
Tuesday I went to the hospital and sat around in the TB department for four hours with another Toubab friend who just started working there last week. Everyone was really nice but there wasn't much to do except fend off the advances of one male employee and learn a bit about how tuberculosis gets treated here. The treatment, which is pretty much the same all over the world, lasts nine months. The first two months are the most important and it is imperative that the patient take the antibiotics every day or else the disease can become resistant. Because there's such a problem with people having relapses, for the first two months they monitor every patient by having them come in and take what seems to be a large handful of white pills every morning before they eat. So the job of the people in the department is to process their paperwork by hand, sort out the medicines, and give pills to the twenty or so people who come in daily. I again felt kind of useless, this time because there just wasn't enough work to do.
Most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I have been in the computer lab writing papers. Boring! Enough said about that. Tuesday night the kiddies all came in and hung out in our room and made string bracelets and just generally made a lot of noise. It was a good time. They also told us a lot of stories about all the Americans who have stayed here, including one last year who was so gross that Mamitie had to come in and throw out and wash a ton of her stuff for her. It amazes me how little we know about everyone who lives in our house but some more information surfaced, including the fact that Felix was in the army and like legit went to war somewhere (or so we were told). Which is apparently also why he doesn't ever sleep in a bed, only on the floor. What? I mean this is the kind of information we get out of the kids with seemingly simple, direct questions, and there's some kind of cultural barrier that doesn't leave anyone satisfied.
Other news: Mamitie is gone till Friday again, sewing more school uniforms at her daughter's house, and last night we watched a League of their Own on TV which in my mind was the best thing on television in the last two months. It was in French of course, but it was so refreshing to actually want to watch what was on the telly.
I leave for Toubab Diallo tomorrow after some kind of conference in place of history class, to spend a day or two on the beach put up in a hotel by our program. Sweet! According to some people who have been there, the hotel is really nice, and has great food. Really nice in terms of our now very low standards, as it still does not have hot water.
Okay now for the story of the week:
So when I got here in January, I was quickly informed that the toilet in our house was broken and that it would be necessary to dump large buckets down to flush when flushing was necessary. There was a flusher, a little pull thing on the top of the toilet, but that didn't work, and I had to get yelled at before I knew about the bucket procedure. When Hannah got here, she told me the flusher actually did work, but when I was sick and in the bathroom for like four days straight Mamitie kept pushing the bucket method, which I adopted and didn't even think about until this Tuesday night. I was commenting to Hannah on how it was really kind of weird that our family has satellite TV, yet finds it necessary to walk an extra kilometer rather than spend for 13 of us to take the car rapide for 150 CFA each, and also hasn't had the toilet fixed in months, and all kinds of other odd ways of cutting back on the small daily spending sums. To this Hannah responded "wait a second, what are you talking about - the toilet flushes," or something to that effect. Which, believe it or not, turns out to be true. Sure enough, it flushes like a charm. All nicely pressurized and everything! So for three months I didn't even think to test out the flusher and have been lugging buckets around and filling and emptying them at least once daily, when the whole time I could have just pulled a little thing on the back of the toilet. This is not a joke. NOT A FLIPPING JOKE!! I want those months back!

That is all.