no rain or lunch, unhappy parrot

3:47pm and we haven't eaten lunch yet because talla and others are rebuilding the kitchen hut. he spent yesterday afternoon knocking it down and then had the bad luck of a late afternoon rain that ruined lots of the mud bricks.

regardless, the rain was disappointing. several hours of buildup, clouds rolling in with lightning and thunder but only just a few minutes of true, torrential, rainy season rain. then it stopped and the sky seemed as though it would rain again later in the night. it didn't but regardless, was incredibly hot and humid.

i am hungry.

the poor parrot is miserable and unhappy.

maybe his situation is better than that god-awful cardboard box he spent his first two months in but this cage is also pretty depressing. he's become this awful dirty green -- nothing plush or emerald like the pictures of his kind i see in the guidebooks. sometimes they even forget to bring him into the shade and he squawks until i do it.

i try to emphasize that IT'S NOT MY PARROT even though people tried to force him onto me as soon as the novelty of owning him wore off because i personally think it was a waste of 750CFA (when they wouldn't even take the baby to the hospital when he was sick for 500CFA) but i can only be so cold. the little guy is just flat out unhappy. and i hear people say that he's useless because he hasn't learned how to talk which i'm sure he doesn't understand but that just makes me feel bad for him.

so yesterday i let him out (i made sure the kids were out of the compound) and he wandered around a little. in the meantime i made him a toy with a strip of old fabric and an old washer. i also attached a piece of mirror to the cage and gave him one of the cat's fuzzy toy balls that he doesn't play with anymore (probably because wolfgang has his own pair of fuzzy balls now). i've also fed him some Leucaena leucophaela leaves (a tree with lots of protein and great fodder for animals).

i swear to god the parrot turned a little brighter green when he saw his new digs.