The Hot Season Continues

I am writing this blog entry from my roof. My roof is usually a good 10 to 15 degrees cooler than my house. Unfortunately, today it's not. It was very hot today. I took a couple of showers, shifted between fans, laid down, got up, put on my Malian booty shorts (=regular thigh baring shorts) and a tank top. For the hottest of days - my newest strategy has been to go work out with my basketball team. Somehow the act of running suicides, playing defense, and doing wall sits in 100 degree heat brings me back to summers of un-airconditioned gyms in New Jersey - where you are supposed to sweat and be hot. This in stark contrast to the image of you sweating into your couch and any other furniture as you try to format survey response sheets.

The good news is - it's mango season. It all happened in one day - the mangoes appeared. Our mango tree is filled with greenish nodes (about as big as a jalapeno) - some which missle down on to the ground below prematurely. Mangoes will be a fabulous fruit complement to my oil+starch+onions diet.

We finally set our survey start date for this Sunday. Very exciting, but lots of forms to clean up before then - we need survey questionnaires in French and Bambara and response sheets in French and Bambara. I am looking them over again to make sure I am not missing any crucial questions and to make sure all the questions I have are important. We have GPSed the location of all the schools, churches, and mosques in our first school district (Faladie) - we are going to be make a map to help us look at where parents send their kids as compared to where they live.

Meanwhile, my RAs have been busy entering the 200 university student interviews into an excel sheet. Really interesting to listen to student responses about perceptions of education and politics in Mali. So far everyone who we have interviewed has been very gracious - hopefully this continues.