Basa Bana!

Happy Thanksgiving yesterday first of all! We went to a hotel for dinner and had some pretty yummy pork, mashed potatoes, and pie! Good stuff.
Until coming in to Sevare for thanksgiving I had been at site for around a month and I think it's possible that my Bambara is finally starting to improve! I've begun weighing babies and doing some other small projects, so I think once everything really gets going it will improve even more. It will also be nice to have a busier schedule.
Now on to more important news and the reason for the title of this blog: a basa is a giant lizard, and they are everywhere here. If something is a bana in Bambara it is dead. This particulary basa became a bana because I killed it in our house with a broom. Normally I really don't mind having the little lizards in our house because I tell myself they eat the mosquitos and other bugs that get in. This particular lizard however, was ENORMOUS and I have no idea how it even got inside the house! I never saw it come in while I was going in or out, so I guess there most be some hole somewhere that it came in through. I think that it also didn't really want to be inside the house, but once it got in it couldn't get back out, so it was just running wildly around the house going in and out of boxes and other stuff and making lots of noise. The first night that I realized it was still inside, it tried to come in my bed, but thanks to my trusty mosquito net being tucked in, it couldn't get me! I thought about trying to chase it out then, but it ran away and I couldn't find it so I went to sleep and hoped it would find its own way out. Sadly (for it), it did not find its way out, and the next night the same thing happened except I actually had been asleep when I heard it running around and getting into things. I tried to look for it, and noticed that it had given up on trying to get in my bed and instead had actually gotten into and standing in the middle of Elizabeth's bed! (she was fortunately not in the bed because she had gone down to Bamako). I decided at that point that I was going to just chase it out or trap it somehow and have the children get it out for me. It wasn't really very afraid of me, so of course it didn't run away until the last minute when it then had to run over my feet to get into the other room. This explanation is getting a little long, so let's just say that I eventually decided there was no way it was going to leave quietly, and I eventually trapped it in a corner and killed it with the broom. The children who came in to get the dead lizard out were in awe when I told them that it was in fact me who had killed it. They then proceeded to tell everyone so that the next morning when I came out for breakfast I had to retell the story to all the people in the concession, all of whom were amazed, but also thought it was hilarious because why would I have a problem with a lizard in my house?