Good Moooooorning

Well, that was sufficiently weird. A cow just woke me up.
I’ve taken to sleeping outside these days. I grew tired of waking up in the middle of the night covered in sweat and laying on wet sheets.
It’s hot, hot, hot here, and it doesn’t stop being so just because the sun is down. We all got these dinky little 12-volt fans in Nairobi in October and had them set up by December, but they’re junk and mine fried just as we got back from vacation—at the hottest point of our stay here thus far. No one has had much luck. Pattie’s makes a terrible, terrible noise. So much so that for a while the children, when Pattie laid down midday to take a nap or read, mistook it as a plane coming and would rush to our yard to warn us. And Abuba hates the thing. At first she took to imitating the whirling sound and would tell us she couldn’t sleep because of it. Which is funny, you know, because of the intense drumming that pumps through the night air. And the shrill screaming that cuts through any sort of pleasant evening stillness. And the crying children. Etc., etc. Anyway, the fans were a bust and my room doesn’t have any windows that welcome the blow of the night wind, so I dragged my mattress outside in the middle the night the other day and haven’t looked back since. Kim swears I’m going to get stung by a scorpion and I have a growing fear of waking up with a puff adder on my chest (Steve tells a story about how his army buddy woke up with one of the uber-poisonous snakes on his chest), but this new concept of sleeping through the night—and that, rather comfortably—is too irresistible.
Anyway, I slept in a little bit this morning, so around six, I heard someone coming up into the yard. But when I put on my glasses, I realized it wasn’t a person at all, it was a cow, close to hovering over me. We kind of stared at each other for a while, quite aware that the other was out of place, before I threw on my flips and chased it around the yard, trying to gently urge it to the door.
Never a dull moment—or morning—here in Lopit.