Yes, beautiful African children. And just to round out the clichés, thatch-roofed houses, nudity, and a one-room schoolhouse with wooden benches and a single chalkboard.

This is the town of Foidu. SRL will be dredging where this village has sat since before anyone can remember (“You see that jungle? Our village has been here as long as that”). The company vowed to relocate them, and they came around to the idea when they were promised a better school, a clinic, and cement houses. Now, three years later, SRL doesn’t grade the road into town (“it’s only temporary”). We got high-centered on a rut at one point and had to commission schoolgirls to help us drive on. No one has a mosquito net, and the people are wondering why other nearby villages get good roads, clean water, electricity and employment while they languish in poverty so complete it’s exemplary. I don’t write this to paint the company out to be “bad”  – they’ve done some really spectacular things for certain communities, but it’s been my experience that alienating a single village can be both tragic and, from a corporate perspective, risky. Foidu residents see others getting jobs, paychecks and water, and they feel they’re moving backwards.

Lest I (and you) get depressed, a change of subject…

Did you know that rutile (titanium dioxide) makes white pigments (like toothpaste and paint primer) but is in fact black, metallic dust?

Did you know that if you stick a cassava branch in the ground, it will turn into a plant that you can then pound and boil into a totally nutritionless (but somehow delicious) mass of goo, eaten with chilies and palm oil for dinner?