The Gang and Rat Trap Sandwiches

For New Year’s Eve I traveled up to Kaolack to hang out with my best friend Jessica. Over the next week we traveled out to her Wolof village called Keur Madiabel and spent some time there. We also took a boat ride through the mangroves near the Sine Saloum Delta area and camped out near the beach. 

Eric and Jessica on the pirogue boat

'The Gang' on the beach trip, Jessica, Kourtney, and Eric

Afterwards we visited our friend Jennie’s Seerer village for a Sabaar, or a drum party. There’s always lots of dancing at a Senegalese drum party such as these, but the ethnic group of Jennie’s village Keur Soce, are Seerers, and they are known for being particularly risqué dancers. Jennie tells me that at wedding ceremonies the women tie a wooden penis to the inside of their skirt and flash it while dancing, unfortunately this was not a wedding party so the photos below (and on my picasa link) are mostly tame.

Jennie dancing at her Sabaar

some of the Keur Soce girls

me and Jessica in our Senegalese clothes and classic Senegalese photo taking fashion

In the middle of January, we had our annual All-Volunteers Conference in Thies, which is held for all of Senegal and other volunteers from all over West Africa where we share ideas about work; it was uneventful for me since I’m leaving so soon. Immediately afterwards we were bussed off to Dakar for WAIST (the West African Invitational Softball Tournament) was held, our team’s theme was ‘baseball’ which I thought was a little boring and didn’t lend easily to an awesome costume such as mine the previous year (refer to that earlier blog post to see the Hamburglar in action), so I went as a hotdog, that was baseball enough I suppose. Afterwards they bussed us back to Thies for my stage’s (or training group) COS (Close of Service) Conference. That was a very sad affair since it was the last time our entire group would be together at once here in Senegal, only a few months left…

Sad things aside, during all that bussing around to-and-from Dakar and Thies, we were able to photo-document the making of something we call “Rat Trap Sandwiches.” My friends Eric, Kourtney, Jessica and I (who we dubbed ourselves ‘the Gang’ because we’ve been watching too much ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’, lately) made this sandwich during most of our beach camping trip which I mentioned earlier. Either way it’s called a Rat Trap Sandwich because you make it with pretty much everything you’d put in a trap to catch a rat. Oh, and they’re delicious too!

Start by cutting your bread and spreading cheap "La Vache Qui Rit" cheese,  open the can of Chicken Spam (disclaimer, real Spam is like caviar compared to this stuff)

add the slices to the sandwich, with optional mustard if you're feeling fancy

and enjoy! Rat Trap Sandwiches! (also this is the bus that we were on back and forth  like 90 times from Thies to Dakar)

and this photo is here just because I like it and wanted to end with something interesting, it's a field where all the grass has seemed to pull pull together like a field of buried trolls. it's actually being prepared to be cut for roofing thatch