I have not yet posted any photos of the house, so here are some shots.  Note my laundry rack by the front door.  It goes in and out regularly in an attempt to get dry clothes.  Now that the boys are in school I have to do laundry a LOT  (Bill and Becky are laughing here - inside joke) as the boys cover a white polo with dirt every day.  I finally gave in and sent Will with the money to buy a white polo (from the Clavis school store) for every day of the week - it's just easier that way.

Here is a picture of my lab class outside taking bulk density measurements.  The lab coats are a hoot, and they all have them.  We do not even have hammers to hammer the sampling cores into the ground - we use big pieces of wood.  No tins for gravimetric moisture either.  We use manila envelopes, which is surprisingly pretty effective.

I never thought I'd grow used to rainbows, but there is one every day in Mauritius.  This is because it RAINS every damn day, and the sun is right behind it.  I spend part of every day with my umbrella up and my sunglasses on.  This view was taken from the bus on the way back from Flic N Flac.  The crop is sugar cane, which covers the inland regions of the island.  It is their number three item of monetary importance, behind tourism and textiles.

On the way back from Flic N Flac the bus goes through a kind of squalid town called Boussin.  We took a detour around a block and went past an entire area of what we would call the 'projects' back home.  It placed the nicness of our place in Quatre Bornes in perspective for the boys.  Although the Mauritians like to talk a great deal about how well all the cultures and religions mix in fact there is some division along racial/religous lines.  The houses shown above are largely occupied by Creoles, a population descended from freed slaves.  Many of them occupy a lower social and economic rung.  The wealthier (and typical of the folks who live around us) are the various castes of Indians who trace their Mauritian roots back hundreds of years.  They have wealth (every day we walk by high end BMWs and Mercedes) and are building lovely houses in my neighborhood.  Their children often go to school out of the country, and I have met many whose children are in the UK  studying to be doctors or engineers.