27 May 2005 - 20:41
Today I did the cheesy aid worker thing and rode out with World Vision in a semi-truck 40 km into the desert to deliver 10 tons of US-donated wheat, Canadian-donated split peas, and US-donated vitamin A-enriched vegetable oil to people in Rachid who are working for the Food-For-Work program set up by the World Food Program. It was a pretty nice day, but I had that "we are the world" song running through my head all day, which got annoying, especially since I only know like one line. And we didn't really do anything other than deliver the food to the storage rooms and make sure that the right amounts got delivered to the right people (who knows what happens to it after that...), so it wasn't too much work - the toughest part was the 8 hours we spent riding in the truck (and digging it out of the sand and changing the tire that blew out). But at least I got to ride in on the top of the truck like a white god of crappy donation food to the cheers (and by "cheers," I mean "puzzled looks") of adoring Mauritanians when we were coming into town.
When we got home this afternoon, our neighbors came over with a present - they found and captured a falcon in their palmery this afternoon. We took pictures and gave it back (for now) - I think we should keep it and train it to catch mice and solve our rodent problem at our house (or maybe we should just quit leaving food out). The only problem with that is that I'm leaving, and I think our feathered friend would probably eat my polio-stricken puppy (he doesn't really have polio, I hope - he just can't walk real well yet) before making an effort to catch the mice. Oh well, at least I'll still be able to have my tortoise when I get back...
And my tickets finally came in the mail (two weeks later than expected and four days before I'm supposed to leave) after a short side-trip to Madagascar (hey, they at least got it to the correct continent, right? what's wrong witht these postal people?), alhumdillah.
