Rice Farming and heat

Hey!

Well yet another week has passed by and I'm closing in on the halfway point of my trip. This has been a good week, although the last few days have been the hottest since I arrived here. We only have cold showers here, which is perfectly fine, in fact it's preferable in the heat, but it's gotten to the point where it's so humid, I can take a long cold shower, and within 10 minutes of it I am sweating again.

Aside from the heat though, it has been a good week. I watched the Super Bowl by myself Sunday morning, and enjoyed it a lot, although I thought The Who was morbidly depressing. I noticed the sky outside lightening right around the time Manning threw that interception, and I could hear roosters crowing as I went to sleep. At halftime I went outside to try and call home, but I was unsuccessful, cell signals are hard to come by here. But the reason I'm mentioning it is I don't think I've mentioned the stars yet here. The sky is practically alive with light, the stars are so clear. I thought all the stars in the Southern Hemisphere were different, but it must be a mixture of the same and different ones, because I definitely spotted Orion, or there's a carbon copy of Orion in the Southern Hemisphere, I don't know.

The first couple of days this week we worked more on preparing a chicken coop and pig pen for the orphanage. On Wednesday, we brought in 500 chicks which was one of the cutest things ever until one of them peed on my hand. So the orphanage now has all these chicks, although of course they won't be able to get eggs from them for a while, but work is still not complete on the pig pen, so obviously the pigs won't be able to come in until that's done.

The last couple of days I've been working on the rice farm again. It's been pretty strenuous work, but I enjoy it. When you're growing rice, it grows on one field for a while, and then it has to be dug up and moved to another field. That's what we've been doing. It grows in huge tufts that look like big tufts of tall grass. You have to pull these tufts up, cut them down shorter with a machete, then we'd move them to Dieudonne's truck, where he would drive close to the other field, then we had to carry them out to his field, and dig little holes to put them back into the ground there. Friday I spent pulling the rice up at the first field, and then yesterday I was one of the people planting it at the second field. Both were quite tiring, although I still think the heat was the most tiring. We started before sunrise, but even really early in the morning, once the sun comes up it gets pretty damn hot. The rice fields are out on a plain though, and both days we had an absoluutely beautiful sunrise and I was smart enough to bring my camera the second day and got some great pictures of it.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, although of course it's hardly all that has happened. Thanks as always for taking the time to read, I look forward to hearing your responses.