Sorry for the delay in blog posts. I've been really busy for once. For starters, I'd like to say Happy Belated Easter, even though, it is "Easter Monday" according to my calendar so I think I can still count today as part of the holiday. Everyone else in Senegal is, so why can't I? :)
Instead of Easter egg hunts and chocolate bunnies, I spent my Easter holiday with my best friend Ally. We decided to go to one of the 2 churches here in Kounkané. We have one catholic church and one evangelistic chruch here, and Ally and I went to the one of which the location we knew. It ended up being the evangelistic church. Apparently this church has only 5 members, only 1 of which actually came to the "service". The church service started out with the guardian, who lived next to the church unlocking the doors for Ally and me. We sat in the small red church with a glass cross in the back of the room and 6 benches filling up the middle of it. It was so much different from the churches in America, which isn't surprising with 98% of this country being muslim :) Ally and I sat on a bench to see if anyone else would show up. We chatted, read a hymn book that was translated into pulaar, and finally 1 member of the church came to inform us that all 4 other members went to Velingara to the bigger service for Easter. He then said a prayer for us in Pulaar, and he asked Alla/God to bless our families in America and in Senegal. He also prayed for God/Alla to help us during our 2 year service in Senegal. It was really nice of him to pray for everyone, especially because we just met him 5 minutes before the prayer.
We then spent the rest of the day working with bamboo and plywood trying to make a solar dryer (stay tuned for a future blog post on that). Ally and I spent the evening eating one of my favorite dishes for dinner: leciri e maffe jambo :) Yum! Then we watched a few episodes of Weeds, season 3 on my laptop in my backyard (it's waaaayyy to hot to sit indoors during hot/dry season). We accompanied our Weeds marathon with eating jelly beans from America, chocolate cream filled cookies from Turkey (Biskrem), and getting drunk off a bottle of terrible red wine from Senegal. It was a great way to end the night :)
When I wasn't celebrating the Easter holiday, I spent the rest of April planning work for our girls conference, IT classes (inchallah), making a solar dryer, having girls' club meetings, eating a ton of mangos, celebrating passover with our 2 jewish volunteers in Koda (super fun!), and working on distributing a scholarship to some girls at the CEM (middle school) in Kounkané. Work. Work. Work. :) I'm so happy to have lots of stuff to do!
Also, this month I was thrown off my bike while I was riding through a busy market. I collided with a walking female pedestrian who cut me off while I was biking, making me crash into the side of a donkey cart; therefore, throwing me over the handle bars, landing on my face, into a pile of vegetable that a woman was selling on the side of the street. It was painfully embarrassing. The people at the marché were super helpful! They picked me up (literally), poured water on my arms to wash off the dirt, asked if I was ok, they didn't even laugh in my face, which was surprising. Looking back, a white girl flying off her bike into a vegetable pile after hitting a donkey cart is quite hilarious!
Fortunately, I didn't brake anything, and the only remaining signs of my bike accident consist of large swollen bruises on my right leg that resemble beatings with a baseball bat, bruises on the upper half of my abdomen, a scratch on my nose, and the nickname "Air Diaobe" which my family gave to me after I told them the story of me soaring through the air (Diaboe is the city where I crashed) hahahaha! Always wear a helmet while biking! :) over and out....
No comments:
Post a Comment