Today is my 2 year anniversary here in Senegal. Two years,
wow they went so fast! And now there’s just about a month left in Pelel and
then some administrative stuff in Dakar, a COS trip to Sierra Leone (more about that
in a future post) and then I fly home on May 1st.
I’d love to reminisce about the last two years here, but it
would be a terrible rambling tangent train with no end in sight, and then I’d
definitely lose the last couple of loyal readers that I still have; so I won’t…
But looking back, I’m proud and happy about my service, it’s been truly amazing
and I wouldn’t have traded this experience for anything else.
Enough of that, I still have some time left here and let me
tell you, it’s a super busy schedule for which I’m really excited and looking
forward too, it’s also going to fly by ridiculously fast. As you all know I
just got the funding for my latrine project (yes, it’s smaller than I had
wanted to do, but it’s the perfect size for this last month). Since the
beginning of March I got the budget finalized, found out that we can squeeze
out 15 new latrines for the community. We decided to allocate a certain number
to each of the quartiers (neighborhoods) of Pelel. Nearly ten families have
already dug their holes and paid the 5,000 cfa ($10) contribution, so earlier
this week Dabi, my counterpart, and I came into Kedougou to buy the cement and
other materials. It should have been a 1 morning trip but due to the 40+ year
old transport that we had contracted, it actually took three days we included
me having to walk about 7km at night to get home while we waited for the
mechanic to come out to Dindefelo.
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| our 40+ year old car rapide transport, spent 2.5hours pushing it up and down hills with the others to get it started... |
Either way the materials finally made it out to Pelel and
the work should be getting started extremely soon, if it hasn’t already
started.
To celebrate the full moon on Thursday night we decided to
do a midnight bike ride from Saraya to Kedougou, which is 60km. We started
around 10pm and it was awesome because the moon was so bright, and the air was
nice and cool, it was like biking in a dream-world.
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| Meera and the kilometer marker in Saraya the afternoon before the big ride |
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| the group on the road, this was after we had "Shirts-off-o'clock" somewhere around the 45km mark. Me, Frank, Ian, Meera, Leah, Ben, CJ, and Marielle (Jess took the photo and kept her shirt on because it was cold...) |
Oh and in other good news, remember how the back wall of
Pelel’s health hut fell down during the last rainy season? Well Dabi finally
got it fixed! So March is already shaping up to be a pretty awesome month and I
think it’ll be a nice close to my service.
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| The new wall on the back of the health hut, much better construction this time around, I have no idea why they didn't build the walls this way last time, but this is Senegal and that's how planning works here... |
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