new blog look

I'm trying to find a new design for the blog...the old one was a terrible color and I finally decided it looked more like northern Senegal, not like Kedougou. Hopefully the redo will be done by next week.

Deep Fried 24th Birthday

Tabaski is the biggest holiday here in Senegal. All the families slaughter at least one of their sheep and for 3 days everyone eats well. This is great for them, and even me, I had a lot of fun, but the mystery meat in the bowl leads to some GI distress over the following days…

My brother Yousuphu and I (and his friend to the left)

A couple weeks ago we made a trip to the Ingeli waterfalls (see my previous post). It’s rumored that they’ll dry up soon, but judging by what we saw when we finally got there I’d find it hard to believe they’ll completely dry up. We might make another trip in a month or so when there’s even less water there; there was a bit too much to swim in the upper pool, not to mention my friend Lili spotted a crocodile. This time we also made it up to the top of the waterfall which had some great views.

Ingeli Waterfall from the top

I decided to travel up to Kaolack for Thanksgiving and my 24^th birthday (the same day this year) to see my friends Jessica and Mikael. Jessica got 4 turkeys slaughtered in her town and brought them to the regional house for the feast. We set aside one of the turkeys just for us to deep fry. With all the stories of people burning down their houses in the US trying to deep fry turkeys, we definitely took our time to plan out how to do it the best way. It was a huge success and so was the rest of the meal that was prepared by the volunteers of the Kaolack house. I probably ate more than I eat in a week at site…but it was delicious and worth it. Great birthday, great thanksgiving! I hope all my friends, family, and readers had a great Thanksgiving at home.

testing the set up

birthday turkey!!!!

Jessica and I

Deep frying the turkey

We went to Jessica’s site, Keur Madiabel, and painted a mural at the Post de Sante. Now I’m still relaxing at the Kaolack house waiting to go to Thies in two days for our West African All Volunteers Conference.

Segou Trail Building and Work Meeting

Halloween in Tambacounda wound up being a bit of a wash for me. Around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on the 31^st I got really sick with a pretty high fever and some intense GI issues (we’ll leave it at that) that stuck around for the next 36 hours or so. But, judging by the awesome music and all the noise coming from the party below while I tried to sleep on the Tamba house roof, it was a pretty great party…oh well, we’ll try again next year.

After Halloween we caught a free ride down to Kedougou with some new friends we made in Tamba. Nick and Katrine are a really cool Belgium couple who converted a European delivery van into a bit of a camper; they drove down from Europe (ferried over to Tunisia) and are traveling around Western African for the next 9 months. Either way, we had a work party here next to the regional house for Melanie’s new demo garden, and the next day we biked out to Segou to help Zach build a hiking trail to the waterfall to improve the tourism at his site. Camping and trail building at the Segou waterfall was both fun and beautiful, definitely an amazing waterfall, here are some photos.

trail building

Segou Waterfall

Adji, one of the training directors from the Peace Corps, traveled down to Pellel the other day for a work meeting. We met with the Chief of the Village (or Chef de Wilase as they say), the Imam (my dad), the school director and some other random villagers, to go over my Community Action Plan. Basically, it was a meeting to go over what the community wants and needs, and what I plan to work on during the remainder of my service. The good news is the Chief, the Imam, and everyone else was enthusiastic and agreed with my plans. The result is I’ll be working primarily on getting our health hut expanded, stocked, properly staffed, and efficiently running over the next couple months. My secondary work will be local group gardens with the Women’s Group, and with the children at the Pellel school. I’m pretty excited to get started on these gardens over the next couple of weeks, and now that rainy season is over (boo) we can start building and working on the med hut expansion.

In addition to all my boring blabbering about work, I need to thank my awesome cousins, Gina and Michelle, who sent me an amazing and delicious package a couple of weeks ago. I think I’ll definitely be good on bug spray for awhile now, yay 100% DEET. Thanks for the photos and letters girls, especially the letter from Baba, I couldn’t stop laughing. Also thanks to my darling little baby sister, Danielle, who sent me a book (which I’m really excited to read) and some candy. I miss all you guys.


Thanks for reading; I promise I’ll get some new photos on Picasa in the next few weeks, once I get to an area with some decent internet speed.