Off to the field

Tomorrow is the big day - our departure for Nara (near the Mauritania border) and Kolokani. I'm excited and I told my parents via Skype tonight that this kind of work seems to combine my favorite things: nutrition, working with children and mothers, and camping. We'll see if I still love the camping part of this in another week.

I'm a bit nervous, simply because of the unknown of it all at this point. The advice I receive is "stay healthy!" I'm careful about what I eat, and take precautions with fruit, for instance - peel it, cook it, boil it, or forget it. If offered home-cooked food, I know that it's best to eat it only if it's piping hot, and generally I've followed that advice. I'm taking anti-malarials and have medicine for a variety of traveler's ailments, and I'll be sleeping in a tent treated to keep out skeeters. But, you just never know and word on the street is that it is NO fun to be sick in the field.

However, I have placed a lot of faith in the people I'm going with - they have more experience than I do and are an enthusiastic, roll with it-kind of group. It's bound to be very hard work, but I anticipate lots of laughs, too (and probably many at my expense, hopefully good-naturedly).

We went to the market this evening to stock up on nuts and biscuits, coffee and tea, oatmeal and dried fruit, tins of tuna and water - sustenance for desperate times in the desert. I enjoyed a hearty final supper tonight at San Toro in Bamako and relished 3 of my favorite things: bissap, brochette de capitaine, and grilled plaintains. The decor inside the restaurant is all things Malian, with furniture and batiks from Dogon Country, and even live music on traditional instruments.

We'll spend about 3 weeks in the field sans internet or phone reception so it'll be back to only pen and paper journaling for a while. We rented chargers for the computers to run off of the car batteries for data entry but I don't anticipate having access to email until mid-November. However, I expect that by the time I check in my inbox will be flooded with emails titled: Obama wins!