Kwaheri Marafiki Wangu (Swahili from Google translate--I did know the Kwaheri and the rafiki parts)

I just sent off two of my three Kenyan colleagues for the long, roundabout, UN flight that will finally get them home after nearly 7 months of Chad. We never meant for them to be separated from their families this long, but they were so gracious about it and patient as we waited for an opportunity to get them home.  

 I’ve worked with Emmanuel a long time, as he is our drilling chief here in Chad, and he is just a wonderful man of God with a servant’s heart. He works so hard with very few breaks, and his work is hot and dusty and sweaty and he never complains. He’s a hero to many across Chad who have water because of his hard work.

Old friends. 

Wearing the neverthirst Uganda shirt I gave him
a while ago, but standing in front of the majestic
flag of Chad!

Henry is a new friend and we’ve been stuck together pretty closely for the last 6+ months. He lived in the other house on my compound, and we hung out a lot due to lack of other company and proximity. He does an embarrassingly accurate impression of me driving, and he taught me Swahili insults to yell at the other drivers in my way so that I use less English profanity. He’s also been sucked into my hobbies a bit, now running 3 times a week and building up from being a non-runner to running 10ks on the weekend. He’s also taken on the most American thing about me and measures his runs in miles instead of kilometers. And he's thinking about getting a dog someday, after joining me most afternoons to walk Joe and/or one of the other dogs. They will all miss him. 

Giving them the leftover bones from dinner

Personally, I was a failure as a swimming student. I thought that the water was too cold and at least the last teacher I had that I remember the most was not a stereotypical Canadian nice guy (some Canadians CAN ruin lives, even if most are wonderful people). But it turns out that I’m a really good swimming teacher and Henry went from dog-paddling to breast stroke to front crawl to diving for coins in the pool. We discovered a mutual appreciation for the classiest of all film genres: the action comedy. If you laugh a lot and something blows up, it’s a superior movie. He made chapatis and mandazi for me. And I made pizza and chocolate chip cookies for him. I took him to the hospital to get some tests done when he was ill and he let me cry on his shoulder after a particularly hurtful day. And I will miss him, but I’m so happy he gets to be back with his wife and children. He was so excited to finally be leaving that he was giddy about it. But I appreciate that it is not because he doesn’t love Chad (he bought a Chad t-shirt and we did a photoshoot in front of the biggest national monument before he left), it’s because he loves his family so much and really needs to be with them. Long distance work away from your family is fairly normal in many parts of the world, but I hope we can find a better system next year if we can get Henry back that will allow him more time at home. (Prayers for this appreciated!)

Final photoshoot before leaving Chad

Waiting for tests at the hospital

Roadtripping to get photos and videos for neverthirst

With la belle Emelie who is also a wonderful friend

In other news from here, rainy season has arrived. My front yard has a perpetual giant puddle in it that the dogs are loving. Speaking of dogs, I’ve now got 4. I’m hoping to be back down to three in a few weeks if the Americans come back. Puppy/Kwach/Kakilé is no longer a Tiny Puppy. She has fattened herself on 3 pairs of my shoes, one pair of the guard’s shoes (I reimbursed him for his loss), a chunk of the sofa (I promise to replace it before I leave this house!), all of York’s chew toys that were brought from America (I’ll call it payment for all the food that I’ve bought for York this past month+, and York has helped with the chewing). She’s currently working her way through a baseball that I hope was not of sentimental value. I did not know what was inside a baseball. But now I do. It’s all over my house.

Should I have named Flip "Dobby" or "Wile E Coyote"?

Joe and Flip insist on coming to work with me every day.

My pack of dogs

I’ve also had some fun bringing trucks back from the field to N’djamena. Victor (our last remaining Kenyan who we hope to send home soon) and I were the nominated drivers. He would drive one truck, and I would drive the other. I told him I would drive the truck that was worse because he is a slow driver and I wanted us to stay together. If I drive the car that works well, then I will inevitably leave him in my dust. This is a joke we have about Victor driving versus Leif or me driving. Victor is slow and methodical and doesn’t even pass old lady drivers. Leif and I get competitive about how fast we can go, Leif doesn’t notice bumps until it is too late, and I pass anyone who dares to be in front of me.  I’ve been teasing Victor about this for some weeks, and I noticed that he started to tell me about all the times he actually did drive fast. Apparently he used to have a bad reputation for killing cars. Anyway, I apologized for teasing him too much, and he said he wasn’t bothered, but when we drove back together from Dourbali with the cars, he left me in his dust (rainy season hadn’t started yet). I had to follow the plume of black smoke that poured out of that car. In the end he had insisted on driving the bad car, and having recently driven that car after we had it “repaired”, I’m very grateful that he did, and I’ve sent it to be REPAIRED again. Anyway, Victor CAN drive fast, but he prefers not to in town. Noted. I remain grateful that traffic is a rarity in Chad, and road rules are optional--pass anyone anytime you like! And I will, while yelling "mjinga wewe!" at them. 

With Henry and Victor at our favorite Lebanese restaurant for Covid-pick up of course.

Emanuel telling me what was wrong with the truck
once I got it home and couldn't make the steering wheel turn anymore.
Apparently it's the hydraulic something.

And finally, we’ve completed a bunch of wells, rehabilitations, and biosand filters in all the Neverthirst Africa countries, and that’s been really encouraging to see in spite of the corona-restrictions. In one location that I can’t specify for security reasons, the villagers were desperate to see water in their village. People had tried to drill there before and all had failed. We didn’t know it at the time, but they took measures into their own hands to assure our success, calling witchdoctors to pray verses from their Holy Book over the drilling site, sacrificing chickens, and burying one near the location where we were going to drill. And soon EVERYTHING went wrong. The machines broke down for no logical reason. The water tanker hired to bring water to location would go to the water source and there would be no water, but when they drove away, the water came back. There were ferocious rainstorms. After drilling a borehole that he was sure would be successful, the driller was shocked when we found that the borehole was actually dry. He could think of no reason why there would not be water, and in his 20+ years of experience, this had never happened to him. We asked others for their opinions as to why it didn’t have water, and still no answers. Our local ministry partner prayed and then he found out about the sacrifices and the witchdoctors. So he prayer-walked the whole village. He preached from the Bible, and prayed over the new site. And our drilling partners drilled again. And this time we got a bore hole with a 7m3 yield  (very high yield) and the people in that village are saying, “Wow! Prayers in the name of Jesus are powerful!”

biosand filters

water from a new bore hole

If we hadn’t failed on the first attempt, the people would have credited their witchdoctors and sacrifices with the success of the borehole. But because it did fail and we drilled again, they got to see the power in the name of Jesus, which they would not have seen otherwise. It encouraged me to know that sometimes things that seem like epic failures in our lives might actually  be a part of God’s plan to amaze us with something that we never would have seen if our original plans had gone the way we hoped they would. We don’t always get to see the reason why hard things happen to us in our lives. Sometimes everything sucks, and it hurts, and we only ever get to see the mess this side of Heaven. But sometimes we get the Joseph moment, “What you intended for evil, God meant for good.” And I wanted to share that with you because sometimes we have to hold on to other people’s moments when ours aren’t coming, and trust that God is still good even when we aren’t seeing Him answer the deepest, hardest prayers of our lives. If we can’t see it in our lives, seeing it for others can be encouraging.  Honestly, in the ugliest parts of my heart, as I pray the hardest, deepest prayers in my life, there are some blessing stories that don’t really make me feel so much encouraged as resentful, but seeing the marginalized, the vulnerable, the forgotten people get a high yield bore hole in the middle of a dry and weary land, THAT is a story that I will hold on to. And you can hold on to it too, if you like.

OK-that’s my sermon done. Now I will inflict you with many photos of my dogs and my friends and my work.

Henry wanted to make sure to stop and get photos
of the town names in between N'djamena and Dourbali
to prove that he has been to Senegal!

And sometimes Joe made Henry sit in the back because he is spoiled.

Does your face mask match your dress?
It should!

Henry tries camel milk for the first time

Hanging with the men around the bowl of camel milk,
just before I started to feel miserably sick.

Even our nicest paved roads crumble

Thanks to Henry for this photo of me and my friend Fatima

I just really liked this guy!
He's got a cool hat and a great smile.

Another friend who drove us out to the village,
by that I mean that we followed him on his motorcycle
because there are no roads.
And he's holding a guinea fowl we brought back for Henry and Victor to have for dinner.
Tastes like chicken!

Antani and her beautiful daughters,
they are only a tiny bit screamy around Joe.
They liked Kwach/Kakilé though.

Emelie and Amanda Chad monument photo!

Emelie drove me and the boys home after work one day.

I let Henry drive the unpaved part of the trip back to N'djamena.
You can see by his expression how excited he was about this.
Note: we do not drive on the same side of the road as they do in Kenya
so it is even more impressive.
Although, having said that, when there is no road, the side doesn't matter.
But the stick shift is on the opposite side and it can be tricky to switch that.

I'm not sure what Moussa and I are gesturing wildly about here,
but thanks for this action shot, Henry!

Henry and the Dar Salam of Chad

A sprite that we found at the store
that is meant to be sold only on airlines.
I guess they had to sell it to stores with all the cancelled flights.

When there is no power in your office,
it helps that your HR/Finance Manager is an accomplished electrician.

Got to celebrate this wonderful woman's bday.
She is one of my favourite people in the entire world.

Another Henry photoshoot classic

I took Kwach swimming today. She scratched me in the face.
I thought since she insists on playing in her water bowl that maybe she would like it.
I was wrong.

The excited greeting of Joe on his return from the office.
Kwach loooooves him.

Burundi and Other Last Minute Traveling

Burundi--all the photos in this post are from there

I got a new passport while I was in Khartoum. I don’t know if I mentioned it before anywhere, but I got it. I got the extra-large size passport because – of course I did. This is the second passport I’ve gotten on my own from an Embassy (not counting the two temporary ones I had). All other passports in my life have come through the Parents, and I really think they should have kept my old expired passports for memory’s sake and because I now want them for my collection. But they didn’t because they are people who move around to different cities and countries and those people don’t keep extraneous objects—though that may be because they keep all the framed paintings and drawings that the artistic people in the family do and so they don’t have room for travel memories. Don’t even ask—none of the framed paintings or drawings came from me. My art was strictly ‘refrigerator art’ that is sent to the trashcan after an acceptable amount of time has passed and/or someone else needs the refrigerator space.

Lake Tanganyika with Congo mountains in the back

The first passport I got on my own was in China. It had ‘replacement for a stolen passport’ in the back because my old passport was in the bag that was ripped off my shoulder by two motorcyclists when I was walking home late at night from the bus stop after coming back from a trip to Hong Kong to visit an old college friend. I was not happy, but honestly, walking home late at night to avoid taking a taxi whose driver refused to give me a fair price wasn’t my brightest idea. I was trying to make a point—to the taxi driver, but it back-fired on me.  On the bright side, though, I know all the procedures for replacing a stolen passport, and the American Consulate in Guang Zhou is the only US Foreign Service establishment I’ve ever entered where the people working were charming, nice, and extremely helpful. For real, I’ve never felt so patriotic. This is not a feeling I have had in any other embassy around the world. I may have said this before, but I’m pretty sure they go out of their way at American Citizen Services to make you wish you were from somewhere like Denmark. Their embassy called Johanne every day while we were in Yemen and things around us were blowing up, begging her to come home. They were on a first name basis by the end of it all, asking about each other’s respective colds and checking up on mutual family members--ok, maybe they weren’t related, but the point is—he loved helping her. Whenever I try to get to American Citizen Services, I’m told that they’re only open by appointment, if possible, on alternate Tuesdays from 8:47am until 10:43am, and don’t even bother coming if it’s a Bulgarian national holiday because they always must take time off to celebrate Bulgaria.

So, first passport acquired with great fanfare and patriotism, second passport acquired through much finagling and payment of money and time spent sitting in a waiting room reading old Reader’s Digest magazines. But the thing about having a new passport is that, while I’m excited that I finally have a photo that does not make me look like I’m both on drugs and trafficking in them, and I love how shiny and crispy the cover is, I don’t like the emptiness of the pages. Though, I should mention that I feel gipped because I bought the 52-page version, which is marketed as this massive travel doc, but the first 7 pages and the very last 52^nd page are taken up by blather about getting vaccinations before you travel and not violating foreign laws. That’s not cool. I need those 8 pages.

But right now my empty passport looks sad, so I knew that I needed to spice it up by a quick trip to Burundi after I saw that I would be stuck in Uganda for a week due to  MAF slackers not flying every day into Mundri and the fact that I needed cash from Ugandan ATMs. Another bonus from this trip is that I memorized all my new passport info so that I can go back to filling in entrance cards while standing in the line for immigration without having to dig out my passport to check numbers.

My attempt at a panorama--how did I miss the lake entirely?

Getting out of Mundri was the first problem. We were at the airstrip a few minutes before the ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival, FYI For Your Information), but it started pouring rain about that time—thunder, lightning, torrents and torrents. Apparently God was answering my prayer for a storm in His time, which I didn’t appreciate because I SPECIFICALLY asked for a storm at night to stop the loud music. Well this storm stopped the MAF flight. And what is up with that? I thought these pilots were supposed to be tough guys, landing in the bush in all kinds of weather. Nope. But our pilot teased us by buzzing the airstrip and then flying off. He told us the next day that he did it because the runway was too muddy to land on. We didn’t know at the time and waited for another 30 minutes or so, hoping he’d come back.

Eventually, have several phone calls between MAF in Uganda and ourselves, we realized that they were not coming back. They said they wouldn’t even guarantee that they’d land there the next day either. “But if you drive to Maridi, we can pick you up from there before 4:00pm.” Sadly, it was already 12 and the drive to Maridi is nearly 5 hours. But we negotiated and said if they promised to pick us up from Maridi the next day, we’d drive down right away and stay over night there. They agreed. We threw our bags in the car and the khawaja guys grabbed pillows to sit on, but Repent and I are tough, and we didn’t need them.

The drive took us 4 and a half hours, but we had to pass by Repent’s mother’s house, so we got out to say ‘hi.’ His niece and nephew pounced on me immediately and asked me if they could play with the iPad. It reminded me of my nieces and nephews…

We made it to Maridi, stopping for a nice dinner in town that the khawajas claimed to like and only ate tiny bits of  (more for me and Repent, who came with us to help the driver). Then we went to go sleep at the diocese guest house because Episcopalians help each other out. It was a super-nice guest house with electricity! But guess what followed us there that night? The Music. I can’t get away from it. Seriously. I’m starting to be a bit terrified that I will never ever sleep at night in South Sudan no matter where I am.

The view from the Stanley-Livingstone Monument

The next day we made it to the airstrip bright and early on a beautiful sunshiney day. We immediately saw how that airstrip is way better than ours and a flight could easily land there no matter what the weather. The pilot popped out and we found that he had been stuck in Yambio because of the weather too, and so I felt a little nicer towards him. But I did tease him a tiny bit about being a pansy who was afraid of a little rain and mud. He defended himself vigorously, because like most MAF pilots, his sense of humor is buried deeply under his perfect white uniform.

There were a couple of elderly Kenyans on the plane who had been trying to get to Mundri the previous day for a conference. I’d spoken to Carol (MAF Uganda contact person) about them driving back to Mundri with our driver. Carol was sincerely grateful to us for inviting them to ride along, and I had hoped to use her gratefulness to our advantage in the future, but the Kenyan couple refused our car. Instead, they asked the pilot to try to fly them to Mundri…(Here is where I sighed and rolled my eyes to the Heavens because REALLY, GOD?!). He agreed to try, without promising to land (I think my teasing struck a nerve).

“I’ll make a pass over to check the conditions of the airstrip, and if I think it’s too dangerous, I won’t land. Then I will just have to take you back to Uganda,” he said.

And they agreed to risk it.

The port on the Lake--you can sail to Tanzania from here

And guess what? It was a beautiful sunny day and he landed the damn plane.  Once again, I was really annoyed to witness someone else’s good fortune. I was only slightly mollified when the pilot told me that we had made the right decision to go to Maridi the night before because there was no guarantee that we could have landed in Mundri. But still, we drove 5 hours to catch a plane that flew us right back to our original destination in less than 30 minutes.  That’s like going to the store to buy a jar of extra-hot salsa, only to come home and find there were already 3 opened jars of it in your grandmother’s refrigerator, they were just buried behind 4 open grape jelly jars and 2 cartons of milk, and 6 jars of pickles (something like this may or may not have happened to me in one of my grandmothers’ houses…If you are wondering which one, it was NOT the proper English one who has a specific place to put cups that can be used in the microwave and another place for cups that cannot. She will also be one of those horrified at the adjective I used to describe the plane in the first sentence of this paragraph, but I try to always use the most fitting word, and, seriously, that plane was from the devil--or I was being oppressed by the devil or something, but there was some fire and brimstone involved).

Anyway, fast-forward: eventually we made it to Uganda, blahblahblah and I decided that I was going to go to Burundi the next day because, to get back to talking about passports, which was what I started out with in the first place, my passport looked too empty, Burundi was just sitting around waiting for me to visit, Burundi has nice lake beaches, and I had time that I was going to be sitting around, so why not go sit around some place I’ve never been and use up some passport pages? And the next day I found myself in Burundi at a lovely little hotel on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.

Burundi is beautiful, the lake is beautiful, and people are nice, but it’s a Francophone country, and my French is mostly non-existent. The Belgian owner of the hotel speaks good English, though, and the first day he was called upon to be the one to talk to me. He said to me, “You don’t speak French? So I have to learn English to speak to you because you don’t learn French?!” This made me feel like a horrible uneducated and ignorant American who expects the world to know English to cater to my monolingual-ism…but actually I speak 5 languages fairly well and a smattering of words in a few other languages, but way to make me feel terrible, French-speaker. And several other Burundians told me that I really should know French because it is the most important language in the world. The thing is, I would actually really like to learn French, but currently I live in South Sudan (a place where the French language is surprisingly useless) and I’m trying to learn to speak some Moru to communicate with non-Arabic speakers and some Somali so I can hang out with the girls in the market near my house. And I don’t have unlimited time or brain space.

A few minutes after berating me for my deficiency in the French language, the Belgian owner of the hotel warned me off swimming in the lake in front of the hotel. There is some sewage that is dumped into the lake near there (nothing too obvious that I could ever see, though) and there are “ee-poes.”

“What is that?” I asked.

Attention all crocodiles: people are coming.
Bon appetite! (See-I speak French!)

“Ee-poes, ee-poes. You know them. They killed a boy just a few days ago right here.”

You’ve probably already figured it out, but remember, I was going on two weeks of inadequate sleep. I was wondering if an ‘ee-poe’ was some kind of eel.

“Ee-poe. You know, Africa’s big 5—lions, elephants, rhinocerous…”

Oh. And then I got it. And then I really really wanted to see some ee-poes.

The next day I called a taxi, driven by a very nice man named Lazaro. He took me to see the hippos in the river that feeds into the lake. We drove out to a fairly remote location to a place where you pay a guide to take you to see the hippos. The best would have been to take a boat, but they were going to charge me $65+ and I couldn’t talk them down and so instead I paid $9 to walk to the view points with a guide.

Hippo mom and baby (behind the grass)

The guide talked non-stop despite a plethora of signs helpfully nailed into exotic jungle trees telling tourists to “Keep silent.” I assume the was so that we wouldn’t disturb crocodiles and hippos who might come and attack us, but we managed to stay safe, in spite of the fact that my guide threw a rock at a baby hippo and its mother to make them turn around so I could get a better photo (No, I did NOT tell him to do that). He then said, “We should probably move on because mother hippos are very dangerous. If they come to attack us, make sure that you don’t run in a straight line. Go back and forth. They can’t catch you very well that way.” Noted.

I didn’t go at a prime time to see lots of hippos, but I saw a few and it was mostly a nice little jaunt. I ended up walking fairly quickly because being in a remote jungle location with a man who keeps lauding all of his marriageable qualities, punctuating his remarks by nudging my arm every few minutes, hippo watching gets less fun. Here were some of his more memorable remarks:

Even taking my photo, he couldn't bare to be apart-
that's my hippo guide's finger in the frame.

“I like American girls.”

“I want a woman who will work so that I don’t have to give her money.”

“If you get fat, your husband will hate you.”

“Don’t marry an African man because they just want to have sex every day, Monday through Friday” (Though this is a paraphrase, as the exact term he used is one I prefer not to.)

“Wow. You can walk very fast. You are not tired? Usually tourists walk very slow.”

At the end of our walk, we were nearing the edge of the clearing, but not within sight of other human beings yet, he said, “So what do you think? You want to be wife?”

I said, “Um, are you asking me to marry you?”

He said, “Yes. So will you marry me?”

I said, “You know, I don’t think it’s really the right time for me to get married yet.” (We were still not out of the jungle yet, so best to be polite.)

He said, “Well, you can think about it.”

And that's the story of this photo as promised

A few seconds later we were out in the open, and I made a beeline for my sweet, polite, elderly taxi man, and we went on to my next destination—the Stanley Livingston Monument.

The Stanley Livingstone Monument is basically a rock and said to be the location where Henry Morton Stanley greeted David Livingstone with the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Though, there is supposed to be somewhere in the Congo that also claims that distinction. At any rate, it’s a rock, but the view is spectacular!

The rock

Lazaro

The rest of my trip was spent enjoying the view, swimming in the Lake, getting sunburnt, eating lots of good Lake fish and Belgian deserts (Speculoos ice cream! The Stillman sisters love speculoos—and these were homemade speculoos cookies.), and getting caught up on computer stuff while sitting in a comfy chair outside on my veranda. It was a really nice break, and if you go to Bujumbura, stay at the Hotel Restaurant Tanganyika, because it’s great, but make sure to learn French first or suffer the consequences.

And one last thing—when I got into Burundi, I noticed that there was an option for a 3 day visa at the cost of $40, as well as a longer visa (can’t remember how long, but it involved months and multiple entries) that cost $90. I showed my return ticket to the visa guys and they said, “OK. Three day visa. Please give $40.” I did. I admired the multi-colored full-page sticker they put in my passport and left, noticing only later in my hotel that the expiration date on my visa was 31 May 2014, and I was leaving on 1 June 2014. I know from experience that immigration people get huffy about these kinds of things, so I asked the hotel manager. He said, “Well, it’s the weekend and the police station will be closed. I don’t think it will be a problem since the visa people told you it would be OK.”

I thought about this on the morning of my departure. I planned several scenarios in my mind, including being forced to pay a large and ridiculous fine or sweet-talking my way out of payment or having no one at all notice the expiration date on the visa. I suddenly realized that if the last scenario happened, I would be a little disappointed, because it is very anticlimactic and I kind of wanted to try my hand at the sweet-talking.  Well, Burundi is a country where all your dreams come true, and I couldn’t even get in the airport without a guard pulling me off to the side to discuss the expiration date.

I went for the head-tilt and the wide-eyed explanation, “I know! I saw the problem and I wanted to go to the police right away to fix it but it was the weekend! The visa people told me to get this one! I still only stayed 3 nights and I was only here for 2 full days and the rest were halves.”

OK, don’t think I used ALL my excuses in one breath, these were scattered into a back-and-forth conversation, but ultimately the wide eyes were successful because he said, “I can let you go in and check in to your flight and then you can pay inside.”

I went in and checked in and was very interested to see what the immigration people would actually say. I walked over to the immigration counter and filed through the line where everyone’s passports were being checked again before immigration, in case something changed in between the moment we walked into the airport and during the check-in process, I guess. When it’s finally my turn, who is checking my passport, but helpful guard from the front door.

“OK. You said you will pay here.”

“But do I really have to pay? I think you should just let me go. I’m only half a day late! I will never get the wrong visa in Burundi again. I promise.”

“But I can’t let you go through. You know, unless you pay.”

“Well how much do you think I should pay? It’s only half a day late!”

“How much money do you have?”

“I have only 20,000 francs left.” (That is about $12.)

“You don’t have anything else?”

“Do you want South Sudanese money? That’s all I can give you if you want more than that. That’s where I live. In South Sudan. You know there’s a war there? And cholera. Don’t you think you should just let me go?”

“OK. Just put the 20,000 here on the counter and then you can walk through.”

I surreptitiously pulled out the bills and laid them on the counter stealthily as the guards nodded me through. The lady at immigration smiled and stamped my passport, barely glancing at it long enough to find a blank place to stamp, which I quickly gathered and headed for the waiting room. Just before I left, another guard came over and said, “Money. I need you give.”

I took advantage of the language barrier between us and said, “Sorry, I gave it all to the other guy.” And left—my passport was already stamped. And no problem—I made it back to Uganda without having to pay anyone else. AND technically, $12 was a discount because if three days are $40, then 1 day is about $13, and I paid $12. That is some good bargaining, if I do say so myself.

The brown is the river, the blue is the lake

Now I’m done telling stories and I realize that this has gotten really long. I thought about breaking it up, but it might mess up the flow of the story-telling. I hate messing up flows. Also, I’m lazy, but now the people asking me to write a book will see the consequences of my long-windedness and change their minds. And nobody said you have to read this whole thing anyway. Unless you are my mother, father, or sisters. Then you have to. I mean, I read your diaries when we were kids and it’s not like they were great literature or anything, but I did it anyway because I cared about you, and I thought it was really funny when you got mad at me, so the least you can do to repay me for years of reading about the boys you had crushes on (Joanna) or how much you hated certain people who allegedly threw your stuffed animals off the balcony after convincing you that they were real and had feelings (Marian) is to read my online blog diary, which I didn’t even lock with a breakable tiny pink lock or hide somewhere up high forgetting that ‘small girls’ can climb.

Wavy-est lake I ever saw--looks like the seaside!