the meeting point

record of visitors in a given 48 hour period

5:52 am today:
a man comes in and has a seat. he tells me that afeah in fact falls on a friday, and not on a sunday as we had previously discussed. this means that our meeting in atulE' is to be moved eight days beyond its actual date and six days beyond its supposed date.

4:45 pm yesterday:
two men stand on my porch and we discuss standard sizes of bathroom tile, the amount of sand, gravel and cement needed, we make some calculations. another yells to the three of us from the road that the mother of the owner of my house is dead.

11:20 am yesterday:
a man comes and gives me my machete, now sharper, worn in and the handle whittled and bound in wire to be more ergonomic. he takes several plantains from the stalk on my front porch and tells me i am expected at two for bitterleaf soup with plantains and cow skin

10:00 am saturday:
four children enter and sit shyly for about twenty minutes. it becomes clear that they are hoping to watch a bootleg vcd of the disney straight to video release George of the Jungle 2, in english with bahasa indonesia subtitles. the movie is enthralling

duylinh called in the evening and asked what i had been up to. i explained that mbei ba fue had given me an avocado, a clando driver bought me a beer, and i had accepted an invitation to visit cocoa splitting day in efong. the bearer of the invitation was very drunk, so my acceptance was conditional on his later reminding me that i had accepted. i decided instead to go to ntchen market on amina, when the cocoa would already be dried and bagged for sale, and the farmers would be so happy that they would likely blow 10-20% of their yearly salary in one day, celebrating that they had finally earned some money.