WAIST

WAIST or the West Africa Invitational Softball Tournament. This was how we all spent our 3-day President’s Weekend in Dakar. There was some softball involved but mostly there was lots of time spent at the pool at the American Club, food, drinks, and parties. Practically every volunteer from Senegal was there and several West African countries Peace Corps’ sent teams as well. Our team was a combination of Tambacounda region and Kedougou region, forming ‘Tambagou’ and this year our theme was cops and robbers. I didn’t bring my camera to WAIST because I was sure I’d lose it, but here’s some photos I got from my friends, sift around on their blog links for other photos of the weekend too! Oh, yeah, I was the Hamburglar! ( I made the costume from scratch, I’m pretty amazing like that, and short-shorts is part of our theme every year)

Jessica (as a Banana Ballerina), Mika, Ari, and me the Hamburglar!

So a Banana and a Hamburglar walk into a bar...

Womens Group Garden!!!

The women of my town are amazing! I had been waiting for months to start a garden with the women’s group but they couldn’t decide where to put it and wanted me to give them money to build a fence (which their husbands should do for free). So nothing really happened for a couple months and I just focused on the med hut. Last week when I got back to site I couldn’t believe it, they told me they would be working later that afternoon on the fence for the garden. I couldn’t believe my ears. I got to the garden and about 20 of the men were there digging holes for the fence posts and bringing the cuttings to make the fence. I worked to and got my fair share of blisters. The garden is in the best place ever, down this one hill and close to the stream. Unfortunately the stream dries up for most of the year, so I’m working with a local NGO AfriCare to get a well and a hand pump that can be built by local welders.

A few days later I met with the women to begin the digging. I taught them how to double dig (a process where you remove the topsoil, break up the harder dirt underneath, and then place the topsoil back on top). At first they had no clue why I was digging my plot in such a particular way, but after doing some charades and some broken pulaar insistence, they got it, and they took off…in just that morning they dug plots for half the garden.

the garden from on top of the hill

a panoramic I took of the garden

the beds the women dug

The Women of the Pellel Womens Group

I head back today with seeds for their vegetable plots, and Morenga tree seeds that I’m going to use to do a Morenga intensive bed, so the women can harvest the leaves for leaf sauce.

Lots of work coming up soon. Seed collections, meetings with local NGOs for the garden and health hut. And the Ambassador is coming to visit Kedougou and Dindefelo at the end of this week. Thanks for reading.

oh and some hippos for your enjoyment!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, I'm back!

I hope all of you had a wonderful Holiday season, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to everyone!

Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile, was doing some work with getting the school garden going and writing a grant for the medical hut expansion. But just before Christmas I traveled down to Kolda, another regional capital here in the south of Senegal. We spent Christmas there where we watched endless Christmas movies, drank and were merry. It was a great time. Thanks to all the great Kolda Volunteers for hosting!

The New Year was tons of fun too! I’d spoil it if I tried to describe it with words, so here’s a few photos, and there will most likely be more up on my Picasa within a few weeks.

amazing food!!!!!!!!!!!!!

all these clams...2$ no joke

Santa! and the Eiffel Tower!

I’m going back to site today, hopefully there will be lots of work to do with getting the school garden started, oh and a plane landed today in Kedougou, this is rare, so Frank and I rode our bikes over, said hello and took some photos.

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.