4th of july

well, the 4th of july has come and gone now. two people from our team had to go into bamako for some things and they picked up two fireworks. they were like glorified bottlerockets. basically gunpowder in a cylinder attached to a stick. the only problem was that they didn't come with a fuse. we quickly learned the malian way to light fireworks. as you can see from the picture we tied grass to the rocket. what you can't see is the fact that we soaked it in diesel first. talk about fireworks. anyway, the first one ended up being a dud but the second was a success and exploded into a big fireball. we invited three different families over. there were about 30 people here. they all really seemed to like it. ok, now for the rest of the story. the next morning while we were back in class two of the boys ran back down to investigate the dud from the night before. let it go on the record that they were strictly prohibited from this investigation. apparently they don't teach kids in malian fire school to not throw matches at gunpowder. the dud wasn't much of a dud afterall and blew up on them. tessa quickly opened up a clinic under the mango trees and got them all taken care of. the nine year old seems to have second degree burn on both of his hands and palms and on one of his legs. the other boy had minor burns on his fingertips. we dressed them up right after it happened. they boy with burns on his fingertips is basically recovered. however, the other boy has lager and deeeper burns. he has been back twice already for dressing changes and will continue to come back to see dr. tessa.