"Excellence in Execution"

Odds & Ends:

• One bi-product of the pushup-off here in the village is that the Rwandan staff challenge me at random times to do pushups.  Today I did 30 pushups in the kitchen of the dining hall at 11:00 AM while I was chopping carrots when the Coordinator of Informal Education came to challenge me out of the blue.  Random!  (I won. The girls cheered.  He vowed revenge.)

• This is a pretty solid website, and I have to admit the biting satire really hit home. I do like hot showers. I wonder if I would go to this personal risk to have one?  I doubt it, but I don't have access to one of these contraptions so, who knows: http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/01/17/hot-showers/

• This was a favorite song of mine in high school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRBGdVCuC5g I find myself singing it in the shower here.  It helps a little. I cannot buy it on iTunes. Frownie face!

• Rwandan home remedies scare the shit out of me:  Today one of my girls was coughing a lot in the kitchen while she was chopping carrots, so one of the cooks brought her a bowl (like a full cereal bowl) of diced raw onion to eat.  It made her cry, but she ate it, and while she was crying she did cough less.  Later (5 hours later, same chopping session) one of the girls finally cut her finger.  My family mother ran over with a container of salt, and *literally* rubbed salt in the wound.  Thanks Mom!

• I am so sad that I will miss Fools this year!  Long live Flash Taco! Check out this year's entry bid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gRjfxLn_5IY 

• This isn't quite as good (bad?) as the 2005 slogan, "Plan your Execution"  (We'll, I guess we'll need a firing squad, a priest, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos...) but in a country about to commemorate 1 million violent deaths is 100 days, this doesn't seem quite right:

• This is the Student Resource Center, where I work at ASYV:

• And me helping a student work on her CV: