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.