Hot Tamale and it's red hot

Actually it's not too scorching but I couldn't resist the namecheck of this Robert Johnson song, seeing as we're in a town called Tamale. Nothing to do with the Mexican corndough thingies, which apparently are named after nixtamalisation, some Guatemalan corn preparation technique according to Google.

We're just off tomorrow to a town near Lake Volta where we're going to take part in a Guinea Worm eradication project. We spent all morning in a training session learning about The Worm, and tomorrow we bump off to the village where we'll be spending the week. Guinea Worm is a terrible bug which you get from drinking water containing copepods. I can remember collecting these from the school pond and looking at them under the microscope in biology classes. Then I thought they were a bit cute, but now I know they're EVIL. If they're living in infected water they end up with worm larvae inside them, which get inside you when you drink the water. About a year later you get a blister on your leg and a little white worm comes out like something out of the Alien films, to lay more eggs in the water and continue the cycle.

Needless to say, we're taking a water filter with us.