its going on to 6 and everyone in this office split sometime around 4ish. me, i ain’t go no money and nowhere to go, so I am sitting here desperately hoping something exciting arrives in my email or someone calls me to say they are going to treat me to a night out.

but not so many folks call anymore. but that could be cause I havn’t called so many folks, and no one really knows where I am at at the moment. credit is expensive for the phone. and then having to meet up with folks over a drink will suck transport costs and stuff like that. and so i become a home body and then get a little sad after a while:) I just need to go back to Maridi and get to work.

susan: that is the name of the lady who fingered me as the father of her child. the DNA says I am not. but she doesn’t believe it and thinks I had the tests fixed. that i bribed a doctor or something along those lines. we havn’t really talked much since that point. im kinda happy with that.

nairobi: getting ready for a big referendum (sp?) on a new constitution. hopefully i will be in the field at that point. could get a little bit ugly round these parts for a few days. this is a very high strung issue. primarily because the government rejected the draft that the people had put together and came back with their own version that everyone seems to hate. and instead of going back again to rewrite, they are pushing it forward and only giving kenya the choice of new consitution as is or nothing at all. well they would still have the old constitution. but apparantly its pretty bad, that is why they decided to go for the new one….

hmmm…. guess I should get out of here…

sim sim and peanut butter for dinner !!! woo- hoo!!!

don’t ask

lots of frustration lately. how much do i continue to help with things. where do i draw the line, how do i draw it, what do i draw it with…

i’ve been cheated. that is a fact. yet i still feel somehow obliged to do a few things… like pay alot of money for air travel back to Sudan. is this because I am just really generous and forgiving? or because I feel guilty for being involved briefly with someone that had nothing while I had at least something and knowing still that that person has nothing or at least appears to have nothing. and in continuing to give i become a much better person than that person is?

when he said “turn the other cheek” did he mean only once or over and over again?

its been wet the last two days. nothing like the southern US, southeast asia, or central america but we still got lots of mud and water. and its cold. actually it is probably only in the low 70’s (F) but when i woke up this morning i half expected to find it snowing when i went outside. temperature is a funny thing around these parts. normally it is really, really hot. Always somewhere between 90 and 100+ (F), so when it drops down into the low 70’s everyone starts to get a chill and they all bundle up to stay warm.

like right now I have my jacket and long sleeve shirt one and I am hunkered over my desk hoping that if I make myself as small as possible I will stay a bit warmer. but when i stop to think about it im not really cold.

the pinhole through paper view of the Eclipse. Taken at around 1 p.m. our time. Don’t have any idea what that was GMT.

I realized I started to look to early for the eclipse. That was because I had no idea what time it was supposed to be happening. But that is another story. It finally came around 2 p.m. our time. I also tried to take pictures of the sun with my camera. I have a bunch of lovely photos with a really big bright spot and tons of glare. You can’t see anything else.

somebody had the inside of a couple of floppy disks. looking through two of them cut out all of the light and allowed you to see the sun. kinda.

oh the heavens. such wonderous events. I was actually thinking that had I been a few hundred miles to the east and out in the middle of nowhere I could have possibly tried to convince the locals I was a great prophet or something like that. but i don’t think it got dark enough for that. they probably would have thought I was a bit nuts to be honest.

This is a picture of the sunlight coming through the trees. There were thousands of these minature views of the eclipse all over the place.

I really enjoyed my first eclipse.

so its been some time since i updated here. sorry for that. currently I am in Southern Sudan in a town called Maridi (In between the towns of Yambio and Yei). I am back to work with the Sudan Basic Education Program. We are currently developing teacher training materials and i am helping out with the layout and design of books.

I have been here for three weeks now and am enjoying being back. It is very quiet, the work is steady and right now the temperatures are really nice.

Today we are supposed to experience a partial solar eclipse. I think we are going to be very fortunate and get a very nice view of it here. I was looking at the maps from the Nasa website and we are located right next to the trajectory of the moon and the sun coming together. We should get a chance to see it around noon our time. If it actually happens, it will be my first eclipse to witness. i am a bit eager to see how it turns out.:)

i may try to take some photos but not sure how they will come out.

otherwise… life is moving slowly. For those of you waiting to here news about the baby, I am still waiting myself. I went for a DNA test and have to wait until i return to Nairobi to get the outcome. At the moment, mother and child seem to be doing ok.

In other news I am seeing a lovely lady who is orginally from Southern Sudan, but has been living and working in Kenya for quite a while now. One of these days I will post some photos.:) Right now I am finding it difficult because she is still in Nairobi and I am here in Sudan and will only get a chance to see her every couple of months when i go out for a break. And we may end up seeing less of each other because she may be taking a job in Northern Sudan with the UN based in Khartoum. Not looking forward to that if it happens.

anyhow… there is a bit of an update. I am hoping to begin to write a bit more than have been lately. its just that sometimes there isn’t much to write about or much that I want to write about.