Routine

Evening sky near Daloa

The good news is the ants appear to have lost interest in my kettle (hurrah!).  The bad news is they have just recently redirected their attention to my computer.  Right now they are scurrying into and out of the keys in a panic as I type.  Sigh.

Otherwise, it has been a reasonably low key week.  My WatSan (that's Water and Sanitation, sometimes also referred to as WASH - Water, Sanitation and Hygiene - my OCD always struggles a bit with that one: it should by WSAH, but that's just ridiculous) colleague Ali has gone home to Sudan on leave and the chiefs prefer one of us to be available in the office to distribute work and handle emergencies, so I have been more or less desk-bound all week.  We had some little projects to change the pace a bit, like the cleaning of the chlorine dosing tank at camp, with planning for a couple of upcoming off-base projects and the usual mountains of paperwork filling in the rest of my time.

The chlorine dosing tank being cleaned.
Is anyone else reminded of the Minions?

On the home front a local colleague, Augustine, who impressed me some weeks back with the collection of potted plants at her house, took me to the house of a friend of hers who has the most beautiful garden I have seen in Daloa.  In fact I think it's the only garden I have seen in Daloa.  Every house I had been to before has the external wall a few feet from the building and a paved terrace or courtyard in between.  No earth in there at all.  

This was a real walled garden, almost Mediterranean in style except for the kinds of plants.  It is large and terraced and divided into a number of different areas, with shade trees and flowering shrubs and fruit trees (lemon and cashew and calebasse - used to make gourds), and chickens and guinea fowl ambling around in the underbrush.  They also had a bush with pretty little purplish flowers and bright red spiky/furry fruit that's used to make red dye.  I had only ever seen it by the sides of the road outside the city of Gagnoa, and it always delights me, but this was the first time I could really take a good look at it.  Of course I didn't have my camera.

We spent a couple of hours in the garden, and the caretaker prepared two plants for me to take home in a water drum that he cut in half.  After all the work he did in the presentation I felt like I should have sprung for a nicer pot, but I'm still pretty happy with my water drum houseplants.  Right now they're on the terrace, waiting for me to figure out how best to arrange them.  Every time I open the door I see them and smile.

Water drum houseplants on the left - an exuberant papyrus that is messing with the perspective and a reddish plant (displaying the limits of my botany here).
On the right are two aloe plants in nicer pots.  Augustine got them for me from another friend a few weeks ago but I only finally picked them up yesterday.