Dear God, are you listening? It’s me Ian.

Sometimes I wonder if he is listening but other times I am certain of it. Right now I am praying hard that I get my money from the embassy. It’s just absurd how long it is taking. I got approved for this grant July 31^st. I remember because I thought, oh god I only have a month to put this thing together, because the original date was the first of September. Well that’s past. Now I’ve just got to get this stuff before it is time to go down. I also found out tonight that my school is having problems with its boarding house and they’ve been told to vacate the grounds, which includes my house, by the end of the month. I hope I hope I hope that doesn’t include me! I would just say screw it and ask for an earlier ticket home. We’ll see what happens. I just hope it doesn’t get too complicated. What the heck am I saying, this is Africa, and everything is complicated!

My larium dreams have been getting very weird recently. I’ve started killing people in them. Up until now I’ve only killed people once in the course of two years. Twice I got into accidents but the killing sequence was so comical I was a little confused about where that came from and not worrying about anything in the actual dream. The last two freaked me out though. It’s nice of Uncle Sam to be putting me on a psychedelic drug for two years free of charge. I like it so much I even signed up for a third year. Time to get back to my last two dreams, one of which was in Connecticut the other on the beach here in Mozambique. I was in the house of a friend of my father’s who I’ve known for my entire life. She was upstairs and I think I was waiting for a ride or something. I was sitting down to an episode of LOST that suddenly became real. The Others came into the house looking for my dad’s friend because she apparently had the key to get off the island (but we were obviously in Norwalk, as I said drugs) The people really wanted to hurt my friend so I calmly asked them to go back outside and ask for permission to come into the house first – which they did like good little larium villains. I managed to procure a snake and a machete which then both helped me kill these people. There was no blood involved but the struggle was a bit disturbing because I could physically feel them fighting back against me. After some time I woke up in a sweat with a huge headache and hurting where one of the guys had managed to punch me in the stomach. Carol had come back downstairs to see what was going on and told me that my training had proven well taught and I would make the entire council proud. I have no clue where any of this came from and a little upset by the weirdness that came with it. My second dream had to do with some of my stuff getting stolen on the beach. I had lost a capulana from Swaziland and my nalgene bottle that was sent by my dad from home. Anyway, I had caught the people in my dream, apparently I don’t think Mozambican thieves are that smart – as a matter of fact they aren’t. There is a cliff at the beach where I go with a monument left over from the socialist era here. It’s the site where the Portuguese Police would throw slaves and convicts off the cliff into a ravine with lots of rocks and sharp edges where the waves would come in and basically beat the bodies to death. The monument that’s there is a triangle with a triumphant fist breaking through chains (of slavery I think.) Well, I decided to throw the thieves off the cliff. Sharks then came and ate their bodies. I remember thinking how long the bones would last before they would wash away or would I be caught. Then I woke up.