Tim and Jolene

Haven’t done any updating of this thing lately, but let me give my best shot to make up for all of my slackage. The month of April was filled to the brim with soccer tournament excitement, as Rabiou and I held the first annual primary school soccer tournament, featuring 12 teams and 20 games of non-stop 10-14 year old soccer excitement. I think when all was said and done it was 20 games in 26 days which is pretty ridiculous. It went well, but I did get sucked out of my anticipated role of background supporter to be a soccer referee, quite the blast from the past for me seeing as I hadn’t donned whistle and digital watch since 12th grade, but I think I still would’ve made my old referee coordinator proud (you know who I’m talking about Janet). I only ended up giving one red card, but I don’t think the kid held any hard feelings against me. The day after I kicked him out of the match (that his team ended up winning to claim third place) he helped me set up the field for the final. He was like “why did you throw me out of the match?” and I was like “Cause you punched that kid and then ninja kicked him in the back” and then he was like “oh, good point.” My only complaint about the whole thing would have to be where everyone was demanding prizes at the end. The whole point of the tournament was to have something cheap and sustainable that would increase kids’ interest in coming to school, but for some reason people here think that all tournaments should end with lots of prizes and money especially when a foreigner is helping to put it on. I think things make a little more sense to people now, but it was a bit frustrating putting in a lot of work for something and instead of getting a “hey, good job, thanks for all the work” each time I met up with people after the tournament they were like “why didn’t you ” or if they did compliment me that compliment would always be used in a conjunction that had but between the two sentences. I tried to always have a mature response such as “well that’s a really good idea, but it turns out I don’t care so shut up” hmm, maybe that’s three sentences joined together, I’ll have to ask for a ruling on that one. We’re planning on having a meeting to plan for next year, and my goal is for them to completely finance and be in charge of the thing, so if something’s lacking they have no one to blame but themselves. I’m also trying to wrap up the years work on the pen pal project between kids in various towns in the Maradi region. We successfully sent off the first letter, and about half the kids have written the second. There have been some surprising coincidences, however, where entire classes have been made up of 11 year olds with a 1 year and 4 month old sister named Frida… what are the odds? But I guess even copying what a teacher writes on the board without having any idea of what you’re doing is better than nothing. I think there’s something in the water here that kills originality. As for other work stuff I haven’t been too terribly busy. The weekly radio show that we do with Kristy has earned us somewhat of a celebrity status, which is fun. I think it may have helped with my bargaining weight in the grand marché in Maradi a few times. I just throw out a “do you know who you’re dealing with? I’m the world famous Aboubacar, wife of Jamila, son of Jerry…. Um I mean Jafarou.” (not sure if Jerry would fly in these parts) but anyways, other than that we helped with a SIDA mural, Jolene worked like crazy to make this girls fair thing in Maradi come off smoothly (and I sort of helped), and we played soccer up in another region on the Anasara (white stranger folk) team. We tied one and lost one. The game we lost was somewhere between 3 and 5 to zero, depending on who you ask. I blame it on the fact that our star left forward of san diego club team fame decided to head back early to do some “work.” Way to leave your team out to dry Jolene. I should also note that we’ve been trying to get all of our wedding thank you notes finished, but I make no promises whatsoever on when that project will be completed. In fact a few have been returned to sender, which I think is absolutely crazy, seeing as we gave them to a friend who mailed them from the states, and they returned them all the way back to us in Niger, with just a first class stamp from the good old US of A. Seems kinda crazy, but thanks for looking out USPS. So to anyone who decided to move in the last year without really fancy mail forwarding action, looks like you might be SOL on the wedding thank you front. The only specific one I can think of so far that we’ve had returned to us was supposed to be to Chris Dolar, so here’s a wedding thank you to cover our bases until the rest arrive (or in case they never make it across the ocean) that I’d like to dedicate to my good buddy Chris. Hey , thank you very much for the toaster oven. It was very shiny, and will make a beautiful addition to our kitchen set when we return to the states. I’m glad you made it to the wedding (or sorry you missed it, whichever the case may be), and I hope the “post-wedding” lull the past few months hasn’t got you down. Did you hear . Neat huh? Anyways, thanks again for the toaster oven, and make sure you use sun block. Love Tim and Jolene Hope that will tide us over for a few more weeks. The school years winding down, and it looks like “in sha allah” we’ll be off vacationing for the last 3 weeks or so of July in Greece with De and Rach, so that should be fun. Jolene said she’d fill in blanks of what I didn’t talk about (e.g. how fun it was to arrange said vacation), so hopefully that will be soon to follow. Thanks to everyone who reads this, and even more to those to write and let us know what’s going on (we’re all kinds of out of the loop here). Blog at you soon Tim PS. I’m reading Dune, does that make me a nerd?