lazy days

Dusk has enveloped the city and lights speckle the night sky… not enough though to make me believe that I’m really living in a city. I’m only reminded of that every morning when things comes to life. There are few street lights to illuminate these inky nights. It makes treks down the incredibly bumpy streets a precarious journey. If I were an Ivorian girl, just the thought of taking that walk home in the dark would surely spur me on to sell all my produce for the day. I know they never ever seem to fall, but they must on occasion as they traverse these roads on pitch black nights.
We celebrated Becky’s birthday on Monday. I was going to take her to this really nice pool by the beach, but it turned out to be an incredibly gorgeous day… which meant that it was too cold for the pool! I know, can you imagine?!? But it was about 76 and the wind was very strong and the sun was hiding behind thick clouds of dust. It’s been like that the past three days now and I am loving it! There’s hardly a speck of humidity in the air! So instead of taking Becky to the pool, I went with her to the salon where she had mesh put in her hair. She is all about experiencing everything African and mesh is truly African! They braided her hair all up on her head, then proceeded to sew the fake hair in (ok, actually, it was real hair… just not hers.) She was a brave soul and had this done at Templeton’s Salon. Templeton’s is really just our nickname for this truly African hovel of a hair place. We had been there on Christmas Eve to get our hair done. (Becky convinced me that I needed to really embrace the African experience and go to a ‘true’ African hair salon, where the real African women go, instead of to the ‘European’ salon she had taken me before!) Well, I can assure you that we seriously had an African experience. I am quite certain that the woman putting cornrows in my hair had never in her life done a white person’s hair before and was having trouble with it not staying in place. That was the most painful experience I’ve had in years! But the unique thing about Templeton’s is that they do your hair outdoors which is nice on these breezy days… and it also assures you that you’ll get a good view of Templeton himself… the rat digging in the trash heap. Anyway, it was to Templeton’s that we returned to get Becky’s hair done, and she got a much more experienced hairdresser who didn’t hurt her at all.
As you can guess, there’s not much to do in this town if a girl wants to get away…
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(picture of Prisca all bundled up on these breezy days)