wow time flies!

5 months and counting... no, not really. COS date is officially December something, but I'm still trying to fingure out what I'm going to do after (extending?). It's amazing to think I've been here this long and to look back at all the experiences. Especially to look back at all the things that shocked me before that now seem day-to-day, like watching heards of cattle cross the busy intersection, or a couple goats on the top of the car, or buying fruit, veggies, or anything really, right out the car window. Actually, America seems so inconvinient that you can't buy phone credit out the car window, can't head to the produce market and select all the best produce and name your own price. In fact, it now seems like a really silly idea to put everything you'd ever want to buy in one big store, with fixed prices. ugh- where's the fun in that?

Anyway. The job is great still- I don't think I could ever get sick of working with those animals; there's always something going on and something to help out with. The baby hippo is still healthy and consuming around 15 litres of milk a day and getting big enough that it's getting tricky to restrain him sometimes. I always think its so cute when he prances around and nudges your leg, but will it still be cute when he's put on another 500 pounds? I think yes. Which reminds me, a few weeks ago a film crew came in and filmed us feed the hippo, which resulted in random strangers asking me if I was 'that hippo-girl they saw on tv'.. interesting.

It's been a really great experience to help with this and probably one of the best aspects of my job right now- it makes me realize how lucky I am to be this hands-on with such amazing animals- I really hope I get to do things like this the rest of my life. Though I was frustrated at first that there was zero information on the internet about bottle-feeding baby hippos, I did discover a hippo named jessica down in South Africa who was raised from a calf. She now has her own fan club.

In other zoo news, our female Green monkey had a baby! I still havent gotten any pictures of him/her yet, but I'll try to take a few.

Other than work, life in Niger has been overall busy but rewarding. It's been a lot of fun having the World Cup going on- its such a different atmosphere than in the U.S. where most people don't even know it's happening. Football is a really big deal here and its hard not to get really into the WC. With the Buvette at the zoo having a tv, and that I don't have a set work schedule I've kept up pretty well. Even though Niger doesn't have a team in, we had several neighboring teams- Ghana, Cameroon, Algeria, Nigeria to cheer for. Which made the US/Ghana game reaaally interesting.. we went to this pub that shows the game on a projector- the place was packed wall to wall, all the Nigeriens were for Ghana obviously, and then us few people in the back of the room rooting for the opposite team. People got pretty excited. If truth be told though, was happy to see Ghana continue on (the Ghana/Uraguay game was even more exciting but we wont get into that).

Ok, thats all for now- I'm going to try to keep it short, but my goal is to write three times this month to make up for my lack of writing last month!

This is Kalia, our oldest hippo- she likes to hang out and weave back and forth by the fence while we feed baby bouban (or jibo as some people have started calling him). She loves attention and rests her chin on the fence to try and lure someone away from the baby and to her instead :)