Cocoa at bedtime

Snoring has got to be the worst evolutionary adaptation. What survival benefit does it bring?

Reinforce your position as the perfect bedfellow and reaffirm familial bonds? I think not based on the number of spare rooms that see nightly usage by a sleep-deprived partner.

Scaring off enemy attack? No, in prehistoric caves it would have alerted aggressors and hibernating bears to your presence so you'd have been exterminated either because of some existing hostility or because the noise just needed to be stopped dead for the sanity of the killer.

Perhaps it's only in recent centuries and decades when we've become fat and lazy that snoring has ravaged people's sleep. In which case forget the caveperson scenario, and revert to the general mystery about how human beings who cannot get through the night without sounding like a flubbering steam train have been so successful in colonising the earth.

I had time to contemplate all of this following several hours of non-sleep next to my roommate [not pictured: this is Kesselee who helps at the guesthouse]. As we're staying in our basic field lodgings there was no spare place to move and dangerous wildlife has been poached out so nothing came through the window to investigate the noise.

I'm reading a very very dry book about the media's bias towards reporting when it suits government propaganda. Perhaps the most famous example is the mass American media perpetuating the story that the Americans completely obliterated South Vietnam 'to save it' [from communist aggressors]. Social media has huge faults but at least it provides real-time alternative channels to make such propaganda less likely these days.

Even this subject matter refused to tire me out. I was left sweating under the mosquito net, awaiting sleep which finally came at around 3am.

The workday was useful, with numerous challenges aired and discussed. These ranged from the distribution of rainboots to the methods we will use to understand which farmers have old cocoa farms that they want to rehabilitate and make productive (as an alternative to slash and burn agriculture in the forest). Apparently the cocoa from Lofa County is high quality, yet we don't know if it's grown at enough scale to be of interest to any significant market.