Happy belated Christmas and New Years! (And let's not forget super bowl!!)

Once again, it’s been quite a long time since my last update. I’ll just give a brief synopsis of what’s been going on the last month and a half.

The last half of December and all of January were filled with much comings and goings in my little sphere of Senegal. I celebrated Christmas with my fellow volunteers in Tambacounda. We prepared slightly traditional food like cookies, mashed potatos, and roasted chicken. Sadly I went without my favorite winter holiday food: potatiskurv (or however you’re supposed to spell that). We also partook in traditional holiday activities like board games (Settlers of Cataan was more like an unimpeded addiction), dance parties and caroling. In case you were wondering, nothing seems to terrify the Senegalese more than a group of volunteers singing carols. They didn’t really like the Christmas songs, but they loooved ‘Jeremiah was a Bullfrog’.

New Years Eve was uneventful back in my village where I ended up passing out at 9 pm. Actually, this isn’t too different from my normal NYE habits back home…I’m so cool J

In the middle of January we had an All Volunteer conference back at the center in Thies. Basically we all got together and listened to others give presentations on the projects they had been working on for the past year or so. Honestly I can’t say I got a whole lot out of it, but it was really nice to see all 200 volunteers in one place.

After AllVoll we had the West Africa Softball Tournament in Dakar. My region (Tamba) had its own team, but to be honest I went to maybe 30 minutes of one game and spent the rest of my time eating a whole lot of fantastic food. Tracey, Kate and I were lucky enough to stay with one of the directors of USAID in the Almadies section of Dakar. It was incredible. There was an oven. It was clean. We had beds. We had a choice of either HOT or COLD water. And the garden was incredible! There was grass! I’ve still not gotten over my shock at how nice that house was. I was literally in shock and unable to formulate cohesive sentences for the first few hours I was there.

After this I went back to site for about two weeks and now I’m back in Thies for my IST (in-service training). Allegedly we’re going to learn the agricultural, and agro-forestry techniques that will enable us to work for the next two years. We’ll see if this actually happens.

This is the tree stump that I can sometimes get cell reception from.

Nduutaan and her son Dawda. Dawda, like almost all Senegalese children, absolutely refuses to wear pants. I caught him on a rare occasion where he was willing to put a shirt on.

I found this in the Dakar fukijay. Oh America, how you've spread.

I feel like this is a perfect sob story "Save Africa" picture.
 

These are some of the children in my compound. Goor, the one on the far left, is being 'tough' for the photo.