Morning tea and evening flies

As most of you know, I'm not much of a morning person. It usually takes those small comforts to help me face the day. For me, one of those comforts is a nice cup of tea. I was really excited about tea in Senegal because I heard that they drink it multiple times a day and there is a whole ceremony surrounding it. I had a bit of a reality check when I got to my training site and realized that my host family doesn't really drink tea. The only time they have it is when friends (usually male) come over and will make it. It is really cool to watch as they pour some tea from glass to glass in order to build up foam. When the foam is just right, you fill the cup with more tea and then drink it, trying not to drink the foam. Interesting side note: I discovered that the foaming is not just caused by pouring the liquid from glass to glass. They add a significant amount of sugar to each pot of tea, so when it gets poured, the stirring up of the sugar helps create the foam. And each time they make it, it becomes a little sweeter. Senegalese love their sugar.

Anyway, usually by the time I wake up in the morning my family has tea already waiting for me. They are accustomed to drinking their incredibly sweet cafe touba so there is a small pot of tea on the side just for me. Apparently it is a bit strange here to start the day with tea rather than coffee. Because my family doesn't usually drink tea, they make it for me as if they would make instant coffee. This means 2-3 heaping tablespoons full of dried tea leaves and about the same amount of sugar for approximately 1 cup of tea. (If you don't know the normal serving size for loose leaf tea, is it generally about 1 teaspoon of leaves to a cup of water.) Sometimes I am able to add my own sugar before they do it for me, but even when I get that luxury, I tend to add more sugar than normal in order to make it palatable. The tea is so strong that I usually try to water it down without them noticing, but sometimes I just bite the bullet and wash it down with my breakfast of bread. Every day I try to pull myself out of bed sooner so I can put the tea on myself, but I have yet to catch them before it is already on the stove. Perhaps at my permanent site I will have more control of my morning tea, or at least by then I will have learned how to say that it is too strong and I want to make it myself. I guess it is all part of the learning process.

On a completely unrelated note:

The statistical likelihood for someone in my training group to be plagued with the horrible reality of mango fly larva was about 1 in 100. Lucky for me, one girl has already had 2, so I guess that means I am off the hook...

If you didn't know, the situation with mango flies is that if you leave your clothes out at night, it is possible for the flies to lay their eggs in them. Now if that happens and you don't shake out and/or iron your clothes afterward, the egg will somehow burrow into your skin, and the larva will grow inside of you until it is just about ready to become a fly. Awful mental image, right? I really didn't think it was likely that this would happen to someone. The trainers like to tell us the rare horror story to keep us on our toes. But it did indeed happen that a girl had left her underwear drying near her window which had a broken screen and she did not thoroughly check before she put them on. (Maybe she hadn't received her necessary morning jolt yet either) So one day she noticed a painful bump on her rear end which she then thought was a staff infection. She treated it as such and was trying to become accustomed to not being able to really sit down comfortably. One morning after abnormally painful night, she discovered the larva sticking most of the way out of her skin. She pulled it out and now has a hole where the larva had been. After this happened she realized that the bump she had on her inner thigh was probably the same thing, but it has yet to make its way to the surface, despite many attempts by her host family and her to get it out. So until it shows it's disgusting face, she has named it and tries to suffocate it with antibiotics and a bandaid.