I want to ride my bicycle.

I came home yesterday from a food security meeting to one of the saddest things you can come home to when you are a cyclist: a flat tire. I’m talking rim-sitting-on-the-concrete-floor flat tire.

In an inspired state of I-can-do-it-myself Peace Corps attitude, I decided I was going to fix it myself. Forty minutes of sitting on the concrete floor and several minutes of cussing later, I thought I had been successful. Five minutes later, my post mate yelled to me from my front room.

“Did you already inflate your tire?”

I walked back into the room to see him poking an obviously already deflated tire.

Getting the tire fixed was not the problem. I had a guy in my village who already fixed my front tire and at whose workshop I regularly stop to get air. It was finding the time between now, at what was already 7 p.m., and my classes today at 8 a.m.

Looked like I would be walking to school.

Immediately when I started out on foot this morning the question I received after “did you wake up well?” was “how is the bicycle?”

Looks like I’ve developed a reputation.

Author’s note: One of the perks I’ve found, though, of being a foreigner in a small village is that I can’t get very far on foot. In the four trips I made to school today, I only made it a few steps before someone offered to take me on their motorcycle.