Bloodsuckers and the Music Club

Friday, February 29, 2008
Happy leap year! Today is a day of recalibration… I just need to figure out if I’m running ahead or behind, fast or slow, hot or cold. In general I feel pretty good, but it’s always hard to diagnose yourself, like it’s hard to notice if you yourself have grown.
One time, I gained 25 pounds without noticing. I was enjoying the pastries and bread of Europe a little too much, perhaps. Only when I got home and my friend Rachel laughed at my big belly did I realize what had happened. So when here, in the space of two weeks, two different village lady friends of mine complimented me on filling out nicely (gaining weight here is a sign of good health), I started to get paranoid. An evil friend of mine seized on my paranoia and surreptitiously laid a foot on the med center scale as I was trying to calm my fears, and she had me convinced I had repeated my impressive 25 pound feat.
Luckily, her fits of hysterics eventually tipped me off and I am relieved to know that I am cruising at my arrival weight.
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````
I’ve got other news, growing stale, but not too stale to nibble on if you hunger for freakish slightly gross things. About 6 weeks ago, I got my very first blood sucking parasite! And my second, too! It started with a small bump near my heel, which I thought was some kind of wart. I ignored it. Then I noticed the tip of my pink toe was quite swollen, and pretty sensitive. I was studying it the day after I found it, when my friend saw it, laughed and told me I had a gigan. Fearing some exotic foot worm, I asked him what it was.
It turns out, there are these tiny, black, tick-like insects which mainly stick to pigs, but also enjoy human feet, especially soft baby and child feet. My friend was surprised at the size of my gigans because usually they itch like mad as they burrow under your skin and start to suck your blood. Any normal rational adult here quickly deals with it before it really gets in the door. Mine had been inside at least two weeks, feasting quite well.
Stoically, I sat with my foot on the table of my friend’s buvette as a small grinning crowd gathered and Yves went to work with a sharpened stick and a razor blade. Okay, I am lying. I was gripping the table till my knuckles were white as I softly whimpered and pleaded for him to wait and do it tomorrow, promising I would come back. (Sound familiar, dad?)
After fifteen minutes, Yves had harvested two impressive white pea-sized gigans, leaving blood-red holes in my feet. Many times in the next day or two, the image of peering into a hole in my toe and seeing a pearl imbedded there left me with a smile on my face.
Okay, I’m weird.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, I know, you didn’t sign up to read about weight gain (imagined or real), and certainly not about creepy blood suckers (you get enough of that in the Wall Street Journal…badoum, chink!) so I’ll tell you about my music club at school…
It’s in a formative stage, I’ve had 3 meetings with one group and 2 with another. We do solfege and theory and I’m teaching how to read and write music.
I composed a little singing exercise with two part harmony and it opened my eyes-this will be very hard. I want to sing three part harmony but everybody’s intonation is very loose (ie terrible) and they don't know how to listen to their voice (or others' voices)when they sing, so it just doesn’t work—not yet…
Traditional music here is basically percussion and unison voices, so they are not used to hearing much harmony. I don’t know if this contributes to the problem, or if any group of untrained, unexperienced singers is an intonational nightmare. Regardless, it will be an interesting challenge to mold them into a group.
I just need to show them what in tune sounds like before I can expect it of them.
At this point there are kids that can't replicate a pitch I sing. My work is cut out for me...Petit a petit le oiseau fait son nit…little by little the bird builds its nest…
I am scared that when I come home, having become used to using certain French, or even Fon expressions to express certain thoughts, I will be frustrated by English’s lack of a good equivalent—ca y est…petit a petit…bon travail…tu a fait un peut?
Anyway, eventually, I will post some recordings if possible…
Till next time…