Rooftop wake-up call

All is well on the roof. We are woken up every morning around 5:00 by the call to the first prayer. It's call to prayer in surround-sound as there are multiple mosques in our neighborhood - so the repetitive (sometimes off key) Arabic chanting comes at you from multiple directions. Around the time, the German Shephards on the roof a couple of blocks over realize that we are up there sleeping on the roof and they start barking. It's funny here, but there are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood on rooftops - rather reminiscent of the Go Dogs Go Tree party - except they are each on their own branches. It's a warm morning welcome.

We have completed 3 days or interviews and are embarking on our fourth and final day. This morning I dropped my 3 RAs off at our third campus to collect the final 30 or so interviews - bringing us up to about 200 complete interviews. Our interviewing coincides with student union rep elections, which appear to be rather competitive/militant. Campuses are covered in campaign posters - my favorite being - Omar Diarra dit (called) "Obama" with a picture of the candidate super-imposed next to Obama. Gaggles of students ride through on motos wearing their candidates' colors and holding up pictures. Two days ago there was clash between machete wielding student groups disputing election results. The police came in and hit one of the students - now all the students are on strike again. My strike-o-meter is as follows - in roughly 5 weeks of working for me since the school year started - Djenebou - my intern has had exactly 1.5 days of class. (Professor strikes then student strikes then these new student strikes). It's going to be very interesting to hear what these students have to say about the Malian school/political system. We will start coding the taped interviews this afternoon.