I'm sitting at the internet cafe this afternoon, watching the rain pour down in silver streaks. pretty soon i'm going to have to get out there and walk home... We found out that we live in the "wettest city in west africa" according to millimeter measurements of rainfall/year. Monrovia, in Liberia to the east, is the second wettest. But Sierra Leone wins the award. I wonder if that's just a coincidence, or has my "rain queen" reputation followed me out here? Every vacation i ever go on, especially if its a beach, it always pours. Seattle used to clear up for exactly the time I would be gone... and once on a trip for work to the Navajo reservation in Arizona, it snowed. They swore to me that never happens... anyway, we are definitely into rainy season now. when the rain does finally stop, we kind of wish it would start back up again, just to cool off a few degrees, and maybe clear out the humidity afterwards

We are living with all kinds of bugs at home, and lizards, and possibly a rat. We keep finding, in the mornings, that our plastic containers of food are chewed through, as well as any veggies in our basket on top of the fridge, and our table cloth... for weeks we've put out traps, and various kinds of poison. the other night we bit the bullet and bought super expensive glue traps at the expat grocery store -- imported from the US -- and put one in the kitchen and one behind the couch in the spare room. The rat has been chewing its way through the window screen in the spare room, and we thought for sure we could catch it there. Well, in the morning we discovered that the trap had been dragged around quite a bit, and there was a large patch of grey fur stuck to the glue, but our new roomate got itself out -- it wasn't stuck at all -- so now we've got to come up with another plan. its very annoying to have to throw out all our sugar, flour, peanut butter -- everything

and the most interesting story of the day is that i got a call this morning from a woman who works for the government. she got my info from a colleague of hers that i might start working on a project with. she needed a speech she said, for the minister to give tomorrow, and she didn't have time to work on it. I tried getting some information from her, but it wasn't much, and i did the best i could to write an appropriate meeting welcome speech for a minister. if i find anything out about how it went, i'll be very happy. i hope it helped her out -- i kind of wish i knew where the meeting was, and what it was about... so i could show up and listen to how the speech goes!

hope all is well where you are.