Gina writes:

In February and March, we were traveling a lot--for work out to the field, for pleasure to Sorada with Siba, for VSO and for pleasure to Puri, and for pleasure(?) to a wedding. So we've been enjoying a few weeks with nothing much to keep us occupied except for work. There have been some random things that have happened, but since none of them is interesting enough for its own blog entry, this entry contains random stories of life in Koraput recently.

Mosquitoes
We have a multi-pronged defensive strategy for the never-ending battle against the mosquitoes and their threat of malaria. We take malaria pills, we made screens for our windows with velcro and pieces of mosquito net, we burn mosquito coils, we have mosquito repellent that's emitted when plugged into the wall, and we sleep under a mosquito net! Even so, we get a few bites here and there. This picture shows how many mosquitoes try to invade our pink princess mosquito net at night. It's not a great image, but it shows the hundreds of mosquitoes that landed on the net and then died (because the net it treated with some killer chemical that we don't like to think about too much) in just two days (we try to clean it regularly)!


Lizard Rot
About two weeks ago, we noticed an unpleasant smell whenever we took a shower. It got to be so bad that we started using the other bathroom (good thing we have two). We finally had a visit from the plumber last night. He removed a decaying lizard (and hence the horrible smell) from the pipes leading to one of the showers in our house! Pros: now we can shower in that bathroom again. Cons: now we know that the smell washing over us before we switched to showering in the other bathroom was lizard rot.

One Volunteer Out, One In
Our friend Hilary finished her placement this week and a new volunteer, Nancy, just arrived. So there are still 5 volunteers in Koraput. Margaret and Jan, an older couple (sorry guys!) from the U.S. are tons of fun and make us delicious food just before we clean their pockets in poker! They're here until June 30 of this year. Nancy is about our age, is from the Philippines, and will be here for two years. She seems fairly adventurous and flexible, so I think we'll become good friends.

Holiday
In India, it's more common to discover information by chance rather than by planned communication. Thus, it was only by chance that we found out that April 14 is a holiday, something about New Year or a deity's birthday or a Hindu festival (or all three?). Anyway, we have off work today. It's nice, since we've worked 25 of the last 29 days.

...and the adventure continues...