hawa gaku: Bambam of the surveys

WOAH NELLY!

i just got back from an epic 3-hour frenzy survey-fest in the multifunctional center.

sporting my nouveau corn rows (midwestern great plains meets mali right on my head - think bambam flintstone), i just got back from week 2, day 1 of Survey Office Hours: the 12 different survey two-person teams came in to turn in survey sheets, get fresh ones, hunt down missing kids and scribble down new ones to fix inconsistencies on stacks and stacks of surveys . like ahab chasing the great white whale, we try to make the numbers for each household line up:

# of kids in the Household survey = # kids in all that household's Mama surveys

(not including kids that live without their mama)

we meet in the Sikoro Multifunctional Center every afternoon, technically from 4 to 5 but always going to 6:30 or 7 in a crazy storm of long lines of waiting surveyors, flying sheets of paper, last-minute printing, and the sweet bliss when numbers add up and we can check off another household.

my laptop lays on another coat of Hectic Frosting - it physically hums and sings and can't use the mouse when plugged in, so every five minutes on the brink of battery death i dive to plug it in for a lean thirty seconds. and finally, on the cyber-threat front, my anti-virus program showers us with alerts of new quarantined malian cyber-amoebas.
walking back to the office just now, i ran into a surveyor playing for the Sikoro soccer team on the football field - a great guy named Francis - and we laid plans for households 42 through 47 with other teammembers huddled around the laptop on the sideline.

PHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!

haha alright, thanks for bearing with me on a survey adrenaline rush blog!

i have a confession to make - i've drafted a new blog entry two or three times in the past few days, but it gets daunting when so much time has passed and each time it's come out asa Gilgameshian epic poem. (and what happened in middle school english class - mesopotamian epic poetry - oughtta stay there)

so NEW PLAN - tomorrow i'll post some pictures and the highlight reel - the good, the bad, and the ugly, the chapter titles of my failed gilgameshian epic poem. (plenty more where that came for those with time to burn)

miss you guys. hope all is well.

tomorrow i'll post my new cornrow look - think bambam flintstone.