Jan 28, 06 letter to Kurt and Deb

Dear Deb and Kurt,
Hey guys, how's it going? I'm currently taking a little break during a walk-about. Every week I try to take a nice long walk to clear my head and get away from the village. It allows me to let off some built up energy and look at things differently. It also guirds (sp?) me up for the following week. The letters I received last time in Ouaga really cheered me up and smoothed out some anxious feelings I get every now and then. Normally volunteers visit their neighboring volunteer to vent and relax. I can't really do that w/o a neighbor, so I go for these walks, I write letters and I call people when I can. It helps and I am almost at the 6 month mark, so it must be working.

Today on my walk I was considering evolution and how I think the Burkina or Africans as a whole might have an advantage over westerners. The way I was thinking is that westerners have forced nature to adapt for them and thus have in many respects become detached from it. We live in a relatively sterile, germ free, dirt free, bacteria free, bug free environment. We don't as a whole do much manual labor w/o the aid of electricity. We don't have to rely on ourselves to grow the food we eat.

We do have better education and ready access to communication all over the world. We have better doctors and we know what foods we should eat to be healthy (although we don't). We grow older because of our health care system, but w/o it and electricity, where would we be? Not quite as well off as the Africans I believe.

The majority of people here have never had electricity. Have always lived off the land. The live in and unhealthy environment and have so for years, yet are reproducing and having families of enormous proportions. They've grown tolerances to dirty water and Malaria. Such items if introduced to the west would have catastrophic proportions.

So who's more advance on the evolutionary scale? If you go by the technology, the Westerners, if you go by genetics, possibly the Africans. It's interesting to think about, because in the long term of thousands of years what type of life style will remain?

OK, so there are my thoughts from my walk in the bush. Where there's no TV, it's easy to entertain yourself like that.

How are things in Indianapolis? Still snow on the ground? Has Kurt started riding yet? I showed some of the people here a picture of me and my bike from my roadtrip last summer. They don't know what to think, I guess. Me, being a woman, off by herself, riding all over the country. I don't think they believe how far I drove. Screw em. Some times a male ego is more fragile than a woman's vanity. That's never more true than with some of the men over here. I've had a few pout, literally because I didn't give them a stick of chewing gum. That's true. Seemingly everything I do for one person I have to do for everyone. I could go off on a serious rant but I won't for now.

Hope to see you guys in June. Ill be arriving in Chicago on the 16th and I will be in Wisconsin for 2 weeks. Miss you a ton and hope to talk to you soon.
Take care
Laura