This is the just first of many shirts that make me laugh. I don't have my camera often enough to capture all of the hilarity - I need a day to just wander around town photographing things! Do you know this guy? Because he's kind of a big deal...

This little girl is named Ramatu - her mother sells roasted cassava and ground nuts at the corner of my road, at the bottom of the hill. I see her everyday and I think we're friends. She's three years old and talks beaucoup...a girl after my own heart. She is also featured in a frilly dress and pink heels in my December 27th entry "So this is Christmas." It seems Ramatu has surpassed me in the ability to walk in heels. In fact, she left me in the dust...at the side of the road...at the bottom of the hill.

This weekend our house was inundated with children and adults from Guinea. Guinea's been experiencing a bit of 'upheaval' recently and the US Embassy began evacuating ex-pats early last week. Five missionary families came our way - complete with 11 children between the ages of 10 months and 12 years, and 6 full grown adults. The arrived about 7 minutes after I got home on Friday after school. About half an hour after they'd unloaded they were building a fort outside my room, and I heard a comment having to do with the hide-and-seek-chase-each-other-around-screaming game they were playing that was as follows: "Yeah! And we can be the Christians who are there spreading the word." I think the child who said that was about 6 years old. I played lots of pretend games when I was little (one involved pretending to be runaway slaves with my sister in the back yard at night) but I never pretended to be a Christians spreading the word...Although this comment was highly amusing, the best was yet to come.

After we had fed the masses and most had departed to their respected houses (because thankfully we only have one family with two children actually staying with us), I was icing some chocolate cake at the kitchen counter and being inspected by the little girl who is about 8 years old. She looked me up and down and then declared "You have a bottom for Bamba!"**

And that, my friends, was enough. I spent Saturday night at a friends and escaped to the beach on Sunday.

Today after school, I am cutting that little girl's hair...she asked me to. I swear! Kids aren't sometimes the brightest at 8 years old, apparently.

** This is the name of a dance, which has no direct English translation, but which is presumably connected with the Spanish verb bambolear, meaning "to shake".