I’m almost at the end of two really busy weeks in village… yeah, busy! Village! Wild, huh?

Last week my neighbor from Gando came over and we organized a tree nursery with a women’s group (project to be continued tomorrow) and made an improved cookstove for/ with one of the women in my compound. She makes tchuk (local beer made from sorghum) in a huge pot to sell every week, but until now she’s been cooking it over an open fire, and that takes up a lot of wood. The improved cookstove is made out of clay, sand, and straw all mixed together and molded over three big rocks to fit to the shape of the pot. It went really well and she’s super stoked about it. Now I’m getting requests to make stoves for other women in town, and judging by how much tchuk and tchakpa is in the marché every week, something tells me I’ll be busy for a while.

Then on Monday I ran a neem soap demo for my Gangam teacher’s women’s group. The oil from leaves of neem trees is a natural mosquito repellant, so when you make soap with it, it helps keep off the mosquitos. The women loved it, and afterwards asked if I knew how to make lotion too, (in theory, yes, I was taught how to make lotion. Expert levels of lotionmaking, remains to be seen) and they had a ton of questions about what kind of oil they could use. When I told them they have to get the nice oil in bottles from the stores in Mango, they were discouraged for a second, until one of them said, “No, wait, why can’t we use this oil we have here? It’s oil of karité, and we can make it here ourselves so it’s much cheaper.” Karité? Where had I heard that before…. Omg yeah that’s shea! As in shea butter. Yes, ladies we can most definitely use this really cheap local oil that just happens to be perfect for making lotion! I don’t think they believed me when I told them how in America, shea butter is one of the more expensive lotions you can buy. So, we’re planning to work on that project in a couple weeks when I get back from the women’s conference in Kpalimé… should be fun!

Other news headlines from Mogou:

-The electric company came through and installed counter boxes on some of the houses (including ours!!) that have already paid for the installation. Now we’re waiting for our landlord to install outlets and light bulbs and all that, and for the electric company to come back and turn it all on. Apparently we’re second on the list of villages waiting to be connected, so my estimate is that we should have it by Christmas this year. We’ll see, tho.

-They’re arrangé-ing the road from Mogou to Tchimonga, a medium-sized village to the north of us. When it’s done it should be really nice, but for the moment there are four foot deep trenches on either side of the road, which makes it pretty hard for anything that isn’t a donkey to get around.

-My taxi-moto guy, Express, got a new moto! It’s a black Sanya. Runs like a dream.

-On marché day, three teenage boys showed up on my porch with 10 Euros. “You need to exchange this for us,” one of them said. “Um, no, wait where did you get 10 Euros?” “In a pair of pants I bought.” Ah yes, the dead yovo clothes. There’s actually been a surge in Bucks jerseys in the clothes piles recently… and even knock-off Bucks attire. I saw a lady wearing a shirt that said “Milwakey Bucks” with a picture of a buck that looked more like a moose than anything else. Anyways, the bargaining continued. “Just give me 2 mille for it! Please, this is your people’s money!” “No, it’s not my people’s money. I’m an American, and we use dollars. And I don’t know the exchange rate for Euros to francs CFA. And even if I did, I am not a bank. I have no use for Euros right now. I use CFA just like you do. You can try taking it in to the bank in Mango, but since it’s two 5 Euro bills, I don’t know if they’ll accept it.” “Aw, c’mon Hélène! How about 1 mille 500?”

Sometimes, I really don’t like being the yovo.