I regret to inform readers that while I am not much interested in writing a traditional styled entry today. Therefore I shall be using this decent internet I purchased for 2 dollars to upload a great many photos and write little stories or things about them. I'll even try to categorize for yah!
My hang out.
This is my backyard very early on during my service. It was dry season so lugging water back there to keep the plants alive isn't really all that fun. Plus I'd been working elsewhere.
The nice thing though, is that during rainy season you can plant all kinds of stuff and have it grow like crazy. Here I have beans, okra, bissap, mango and cashew seedlings, the trees are moringa, some squash and cucumbers are visible. Don't know if my watermelons are visible but everything is much bigger as I write than it was a few months back when I took this photo. The tree in the back right is related to beans and puts out a neat bean pod looking thing which can be cooked and eaten just the same as beans. Also there's my Karate striking post which I use daily. If you start off slowly it kills/dulls the nerves in your knuckles. Then you can hit it a little harder and it creates microfractures in your bones which scar over and bone scars are quite dense and hard.
My environment.
In contrast to the back of my hut this is a photo from Thies, the larger city where I did most of my training early on in service. Obviously this is a little negative on account of all the trash, but it was what I wanted to get across. Without a waste management system, much of the cityscape is varying degrees of this sort. The railroad is more of a dumping area than markets or homes but walking around anything but very rural villages and you'll see something similar.
A favorite part about rainy season is the seasonal riverbed less than 1km from my village. It's beautiful for several months.
The same.
Within the river bed are some fishing nets. One day for dinner my family cut up an catfish looking thing and I was a little reluctant to consume it knowing it originated from this close to village(being that field pesticides and herbicides travel downhill same as rain). While the fishballs that are made do not typically appeal to me, I sampled these and swear to you that, even without seasoning, they tasted like sausage. Sad I only got to try it once.
I love this picture because while standing here I felt all mystical and magical. As though I were in some Lord of the Rings adventure or looking at a swamp/forrest mana card from Magic the Gathering.
Rainy season also means RICE! and lots of it. The reason for taking this photo was also to show the ingredients to my favorite dish. Rice and foleree with palm oil.
Sorry I couldn't figure out how to turn this, but it's Okra. You can see a little one growing about center frame.
This here is bissap. To make my favorite dish the rice is cooked and then ground up okra and bissap leaves are made into a mildly slimy and salty leaf sauce. Next palm oil is put around the edge of the dish. One could make palm oil from(I believe) crushing the nuts the tree produces.
One afternoon as another volunteer and I were headed to my roadtown I commented that it looked like rain. As rainy season is on it's way out the other volunteer dismissed my conjecture. After loading a bus and heading back to their village I restated my hypothesis to myself and bike the 7km/4mile back to village as fast as I could so that this scene could great me. As beautiful as it is, I still caught several raindrops as I took the corner into my compound. Also it's harvest season and you will notice that the sorghum has been bent over and harvested in half of this field.
Biking back to village from another volunteers site about a week back brought me to this excellent sunrise. Then of course I had to turn and try to get to site about 3km away before it became dark and stranded me in the woods.
Critters and crawlers.
This was the first scorpion I had seen in real life. I was walking and noticed it about two yards away and just froze. After a few seconds of it not moving and looking all dead I figured it was dead, turned out it was. So I took the opportunity to study it like any good science oriented person. Fascinating. Wish I could have examined it when it was alive. I've seen about 5 total. Most dead. The one that was alive was being flung at children, by other children. Ho ho ho, kids these days.
This is a spider I found(almost with my face) while out wandering in the woods. It interested me because of its spiny body. The hand is present merely for contrast.
This giant cricket cousin was behind my hut making the loudest cricket noise ever. It literally hurt my ears it was so loud up close. Though very cool.
I noticed within a bush there was a little beetle and wanted to examine him closer. Here he is! I like his horn.
Although after looking at the beetle for several seconds I noticed that the bottom of the plant he was on looked like this and that it's head was about 5 inches from my foot. So I moved back a little even though he was only about 17 inches long. Lil cutie.
People!
Sorry Ruble for the less than flattering picture. But here are some photos of the village wedding held by Jenny Cobb and her fiance Jake Castillo.
Here we have Jenny(Hoolay as her village calls her) pre makeup and dress. The hand art? is a local leaf that when dried, ground up, and soaked in water stains skin. Women primarily use it on hands and feet to make designs like temporary henna tattoos in the states.
J squared coming out for the big reveal.
You know, it's a wedding sorta. I don't understand them nomatter what continent they're on.
So the Senegalese favorite dish is ceeb(pronounced cheb) and usually fish but also meat sometimes. Hoolay found a nice goat willing to be eaten and here is some of the early prep work of pouring the oil into the rice cooking bowl. Obviously most meals are not cooked on such large pots, but this was a party and people like to eat!
You can see some of the rice mid cooking and a bowl of chopped onions. The two women are getting ready to pound something. The straight face is a popular expression among younger Senegalese. I asked my host brother why kids didn't smile when he was photographing them for his work and he said because they didn't want to. The morter pestle combo is called the unugol and korngol in pulaar. The stick being the unugol and the bowl the korngol.
Matching outfits!
Sometimes I like to just come into the regional house and make up my own breakfast. Here we've got some nice sweet potato hash with very fluffy scrambled eggs and tomatoes basil and onions with a little cheese covering, not forgetting the essential glass of chocolate milk. Peace out!
