Guys, check this out.

I do complain about my students a lot. I think this is fair, as they certainly complain about me. But on the whole they are fantastic kids, as long as you keep them away from improvised weapons. They're often startling thoughtful, insightful, and smart in all kinds of surprising ways, and I'm constantly delighted that it's actually my job to hang out and talk to them.

And they give me presents all the time. Just little things; things they have to part with. The elementary kids give me pencils, erasers, trading cards and stickers. If they make cookies or soap in a class they come and give me those. Or they run in and break up a candy bar to feed me some of it.

The middle school kids get really creative with this one, though. They're the ones who give me elaborate drawings of robots or origami monsters. The space under my computer monitor at school is currently cluttered with little paper finger puppets a boy gave me because I saw him making them and told him they were cool.

And then a few days back one of my boys decided to draw a picture of me up on the board before class started. It made me smile.

It's also worth pointing out that I was on drugs to prevent malaria at the time.

Of course, everyone involved in kickboxing here all seem to be a little odd for Korea.

I probably shouldn't be actively encouraging con artists, but they do make me laugh.

We're mostly joking, except when we're not.

Peace Corps, Part the Second

Peace Corps, Part the First

I was highly suspicious of evry new food I was offered for weeks after.

On the one hand, I'm eating healthier. On the other, my groceries cost about five times as much as they used to.

Everyone has their own problems, of course, but these seem to irritate me the most. Maybe because I grew up with them.

In which I am not mauled by a bear or a tiger, amazingly.

I did get them back after they were chewed up.

We are clearly not cut out to be buddhists.

It's not an actual soccer ball, happily, or they'd have broken my head by now.

This is why you need a Malian name if you live there--it's hard to get stuff done without it.

It's weird now when I go back to America and no one looks at me, actually.

I seem to have a lot of strong opinions about animals.

More realistically, the differences between Mali's skirt-bat and the more graceful bats in Nepal probably just have to do with them being different species. Different kinds of bat brains specialize in different kinds of flying depending on what their environment is like (I wrote a paper on brain sizes once, which is how I now know this extremely useful factoid. And to think people sneered at my anthropology degree.). Unless skirt-bat was just having a really bad night.

It's a little surreal when you're bleeding that much, but nothing hurts.

Interestingly, it was much harder to get out of the country. I got patted down three times.

 

The end of this story is actually fairly anticlimactic--I managed to get to a friend without anything else going wrong and he took charge of feeding me until my bank opened up on the other side of the world and I could call them to hyperventilate into the phone. But there were a couple of hours where I was calculating how long the trail mix in my bag would last.