Quote of the Week: Glen- If anyone sees my n*** rolling around on the floor… (On the prison bus… on our way back from Tibati… on a particularly turbulent, pot-hole filled “road.”)

I have nothing exciting to tell you guys this week (Yes, yes. Make your joke. “Do you ever?” HAhahaa… moving on), so I guess I will tell you about our first provincial meeting. To give you a sense of how enticing provincial meetings are to us PCV freshmen, I will let you know that Kelly and I were still trying to get out of it as we were boarding the prison bus in Ngaoundere. The meeting was in Tibati (home of Alana).

Alana… Girl, you know I love you… As a matter of fact, if love were measured in the amount of hours in which one is willing to sit on a prison bus and jeopardize one’s fertility… well, then that would mean that I love you more than anyone in the world. Anyhow, my point is that… unless Papa John’s, The Cheesecake Factory, and/or Chippendale’s rolls up into your hood… I will be seeing you somewhere again… but that somewhere will not be Tibati.

Those stewped bush taxis are meant to hold 20 people comfortably and 25, uncomfortably. I swear that there were at least 6,000 people in our car. For 7 hours, I was squished in this piece of junk… could not move my legs… could not move my knees… could not move my arms… I could not even flex a butt cheek. Horrendous. Also, our prison bus had no glass in the windows… just big open squares… Now, even in the prison busses with windows, I still ingest 50 million lbs. of dust per hour. Without windows… I looked like I had eaten too much spice on Arrakis or something (Yah, yah. I know. But Felipe made the reference too, so I'm not the only dork:p). I was seriously expecting a huge worm to come out of the ground and eat me. Actually, I was praying that it would come any minute and end my misery.

Seven hours… on a prison bus… with no windows. My hair literally turned a bright reddish brown from all of the dust. The rest of them made fun of me, saying that I looked like The Picture of Dorian Gray, cuz every time they looked at me, my hair was a lighter shade of red. It was hard to respond though. The road was so bad, at times, that it felt like someone was rapidly and continuously banging on your back, so all of our words reverberated. At one point, I thought that I could actually feel my organs collapsing. Once we got back to Ngaoundere (after the clouds departed, the angels descended, and we all sang rejoicefully at the paved roads), I was still washing dust out of my hair after my third shower at the mission.

As for the actual meeting itself… Like I said… love you guys… but can our next provincial meeting be done in an online chat room? My body cannot handle anymore abuse, and if I want to dye my hair red… I’ll get some henna :/

TMI- I finally understand why so many PCVs go commando so often… It is amazing that such simple things make us so happy… weekly showers… edible food… etc.

posted by Me at 9:35 AM