Things

Well today is Friday and I'm just going to take it easy and wrap up a few things at work today so I thought I would jump on-line and ramble about a few things that are interesting to even fewer people.

First off I have to make a confession. I have been pondering over this for many months now that I have been in The Gambia and have been meaning to write about it but just haven't gotten around to it until now. As many of you know in the past kids kind of freaked me out and I didn't really know how to deal with them. They always seemed unpredictable and slightly dangerous to themselves or other things around them. Like a pack of wild dogs or something. Anyway all of this probably comes from the fact that I have never been around kids too much in the states. All that changed once I came to The Gambia. Here kids of all ages are everywhere. They dominated life more than anything else as far as I tell. I think the rule of thumb here would be where there is one kid there are at least 17 more lurking just around the corner. As you can imagine this was somewhat traumatic when I first arrived but after living in that environment constantly for almost a year now I have learned to enjoy it to a certain extent. So my confession is that I guess kids aren't as annoying as I once thought they were. Now, there are those of you in the crowd that might take this point and run with it a little too much so before you get too excited let me rein you back in. While learning to enjoy having OTHER PEOPLES kids around and playing with them I have also become even more sure that I don't want to have my own kids. My window of patience for kids is still limited and I have not once thought that having kids of my own would be a good idea. So those of you who have or are planning to have kids you can breath a little easier in knowing that they can enjoy a fun weekend of camping with uncle Andy but your still out of luck as far as kids on this end.

I have been taking some pictures at the Beekeepers this week so I could give you an idea of what we have been working on there. Some of the pics are of the new construction that has begun over the last week at our main headquarters site. Once finished we will have new and renovated office space, training area, tourist center, and processing center. There are also some pictures of the honey filter system that I have been working on. This is made from locally available materials and the aim is to make the cleaning of the harvested honey quicker and easier to do on a large scale. It basically consists of two buckets with a filter in between. The dirty honey goes in the top bucket and seeps through the filter into the bottom bucket. The design can be simply modified to make a multi stage filter by adding another bucket on top. We are going to start testing a 2 stage filter next week to see if it can speed things up a bit. Currently the impurities clog the finest filter too quickly so we need to add a larger diameter filter to the process before the honey reaches the fine filter. Its not rocket science but so far it seems like it will yield cleaner honey and make handling the large volumes of honey more efficient.

There are also some pictures of Lydia's trek for work. She most of you probably read her blog but she went up river a few weeks ago for a week of observation. The lecturers at the college go to see how the new teacher trainees in the field are doing.

In other news... there isn't really any. Were both doing good and enjoying ourselves. Were going to head south to Kartong next week and enjoy a few days of R&R. We here there is a nice quiet village there and there is supposed to be some sort of festival going on over the next weekend. That's if for now. Hope to hear from you soon.