two blind mice

A mouse just nearly ran over my feet, so this post is timely.

I'm here in the Nigerian cyber cafe, the one everybody tells me not to go to. But I canùt get into any others because there's no electricity or any free, etc.

I've taken to heating the water for coffee in the mornings and the other day I wqs greeted with the corpses of two mice right there next to the gas burner. Sigh. I have quite a problem with how they choose to leave the dinner dishes all out lying there with food until the maid comes in the morning. There's no good reason.

I like the maid, Absa, though I have no idea what she thinks of me. She doesn't speak much French. Everybody here speaks Wolof but only the well educated really speak French. Makes communicating with women pretty difficult. The woman of the house, Ngeye Khady, had French for 9 years in school but doesn't really understand the difference between I you he she it, etc. Makes for some pretty interesting conversations.

Anyway the rodent issue is a strange one for me because everybody I meet in every house is so clean. Why the cockroaches and mice? And there was a rat carcass by the side of the road and that rat was about the size of an American cat. Blech.

But again, the cleanliness standards here are fantastic so all is good on that front. I eat street food regularly with no ill effects. Garbage trucks drive around regularly and people walk out with their buckets to toss in. It is a clean country. I was going to say especially here in Camberene, a very religious area where smoking in public is forbidden, but it's clean almost everywhere. So enough about that.