Yesterday I finally broke down and bought myself insecticide spray. This isn't the stuff you spray on yourself to gently ward off insects. No. This is the stuff you spray around when you have the intention of actually causing their untimely death.

My room had become a breeding ground for flies, and I couldn't even sit for one minute inside without feeling like I was being molested every five seconds by a hairy, brainless, six-legged creature. So I went to our closest corner store right before lunch, and just before sitting down to the bowl with my family, I sprayed it in my room: all around the window, the edges of my bed, and around the door, closing it behind me. Half an hour later, full of delicious rice and fish, I opened up the door to my room to count twenty - that's right, twenty - dead flies on my floor. I had to go get a broom to sweep them all out, a few of them still twitching. Ooh. I know some people believe all life is sacred, but I just don't know what purpose in life flies serve, except to annoy human beings and other animals. And perhaps I'm killing some of my own brain cells with this anti-fly toxin, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to be able to have some peace of mine, which is so precious to me here.

So you may rightfully now ask, what have I been doing the last six weeks here at site that I need peace of mind?
Just the usual stuff: getting out into the community seven days a week, trying to get a feel for what my job is, getting to know my city and the people in it.
Things are getting easier, bit by bit, and more and more people are starting to know me. The routes I traverse every day are becoming friendlier. But every day that I walk down a new street, I still feel as if I were a dancing bear who escaped from the circus. Some kids run towards the bear with gleeful smiles and yells, because they think that it's neat that the bear can dance. Many people expect the bear to do other tricks, but the bear doesn't know any of the ones they like. Some little children are afraid of the bear and run away, because they've never seen one in real life. Other older people look at the bear with scorn, as if it were in bad taste for the bear to go out in public, especially unaccompanied by its trainers. So it happens that by the end of many days, the bear just wishes it could go back to the circus, because at least there it felt accepted and praised for what it was.

But since the circus is far away and the bear knows that being here now is more important, it tries to find ways to blend in, to walk on all fours, to change its ways to make itself more acceptable and not so bizarre. Maybe one day, if the bear works hard enough, people will stop pointing it out as odd, and maybe the bear will even earn a few real friends before it goes back to the circus. But for now, at the end of the day, no matter what it does, few people can get past the fact that the bear is still a bear.