a week ago was our 6 months mark. it really doesnt feel like i've been here that long. but thinking back to the life i had 6 months ago and comparing it to now, i cant help but smile. i think i've become somewhat of a dirty hippie. i was thinking the other day, how hard it is to truly describe the life here. one can only live it to fully understand the absurdities of such things as riding in cars that swerve continually for hours upon hours dodging potholes every feet or so, or biking through mud and sand to villages where children have never seen a foreigner, or being ok with not having electricity for days at a time, or living paycheck to paycheck to the point where you only have 1 US dollars worth left in your pocket. public transportation is predictably unpredictable. having skin problems during the rainy season is so commonplace - the combination of the humidity and moistness in the air with undernourishment, as well as constant flies wreaking havoc on your open wounds made from mosquito bites, makes me look like i have leprosy or the bubonic plague or herpes or gangrene all over my legs. i have spared yall the pictures of my pus-ing open wounds but the doc claims they are all staph infections since they havent healed after months. getting meds for them now so hopefully they'll look better soon. i digress... but anyway, ramadan, the month of fasting, has finally ended in the culmination of a holiday called korite, which wasnt as exciting as everyone made it out to be, except for the fact that now i can now resume eating breakfast and lunch at somewhat proper hours. i have survived my very first ramadan! (and gained lots of street credit as a result)... so i fasted for 15 days out of the 29, which included not drinking water. the rest was spent talking to my counterparts and figuring out details about my project, reading 5 books, and doing a ton of bush biking around my village, which added up to around 320k or close to 200 miles. pretty sweet if i may say so myself... although i've lost close to 15 pounds. any protein that i eat goes straight to my thighs/calves, thanks to biking.
we got a new dog and dubbed her helen keller (go figure)... though she is a serious needle in all our asses so we may have to part with her soon, enshallah.
i decided to go herding with my brother one day (crossing this one of the things to do list before i die!). herding... is like taking a dog for a stroll in the park. except its a herd of sheep. and you're in the middle of nowhere. it's a very solitary life and i feel slightly saddened that people have to do it. i, for one, cannot herd as an occupation - it's just too lonely.
there's no one to talk to, not even fellow herders because you dont want to get your animals mixed together, so you stay apart from other people. and then it's a lot of sitting or standing around watching them eat, rest, frolic, fornicate with the occasional moving to the next patch of fresh greeneries... quite the life huh? haha, it's overrated but cool nonetheless. the isolation and beauty of the open wilderness is breathtaking.
on one of my bike trips, my friends came up to visit me in the Yang and we decided to do a back bush tour all the way through the forest/desert back to our regional house in the Ling, some 50 odd kilometers away. the night before, it rained an ungodly amount - which in the long run we are thankful for because it packed the sand, that would have been unbikeable through, had it been dry and too sandy - but as it occurred, sucked because my roof leaked (yeah it was raining that hard) and i felt like archimedes, the owl, in the sword in the stone cartoon in merlin's tower putting teapots underneath leaks. the morning of, and i guess throughout the day, we had a ton of bike problems but all in all, it was quite an interesting bike ride. we had to bike through puddles that were a little under knee deep - the puddles were... probably filled with animal feces. at some point, there were no roads, just barely visible tracks on the ground that criss-crossed and split off. we had to ask random pulaar compounds the direction toward the next random pulaar compound in hopes that we would come across something. but wow, is it beautiful out there. untouched by civilization, no electricity or telephone poles, no planes flying overhead. it was as if we werent living in 2010, where across a small ocean is a booming metropolis called new york city. 
an unfortunate sight, the upside down bike - during repair...
covered in mud toward the end of the day...
my tomatoes and eggplant and okra pepinieres grew pretty well that i had to expand my garden, pretty much doubling it's size for space to outplant. it required a ton of weeding, but my garden is starting to look like a real garden...
a shot of my entire plot...
dont be deceived by the over-green-ness of my garden. there are a ton of weeds so actually my garden is less productive than it looks...
mint is growing well...
my random tree pepinieres are coming up... i have no idea what trees they are. although some are leucena, and i like those...
when my friend said dont plant watermelon too close to other things, she wasnt kidding. the watermelon are spreading like weeds, overrunning an entire section of my plot!
a shot of the prosperous eggplants...
a shot of the tomatoes...
my brother planted SO MANY OKRA... firstly you dont pepiniere okra. you plant them individually and apart from each other and let them grow big. you cant move them. they are so going to die after my transplanting...
my moringa trees are getting pretty massive...
now would you look at that... is that a... baby watermelon?!
i found this rascal hiding behind a ton of leaves... umm so my garden is actually somewhat productive and things are actually growing... who knew i could grow stuff in the desert...
i found a baby scorpion outside my room... i wonder if it's stinger can cause pain already...
now this is... a life experience. so, ok we get milk and yogurt in the middle of no where, where refrigerators dont exist. ive accepted this fact. but the other day i had a substance called diiw u noor that my family bought from pulaars. at first, i compared its taste to that cringing expression when you enter a locker room after a football game. repulsive? diiw u noor is yogurt that has been left out, and when the top of the yogurt turns yellow (im assuming from going bad), they scrape it off and boil it and turn it back into an oil. unappetizing i know. but the 2nd time, my sister made it, and it wasnt so bad (?)... the flavor is close to saganaki cheese. like if oil was saganaki cheese flavored, youd have what i tasted. (saganaki cheese is that cheese you light on fire in greek restaurants, fyi). and actually, i think that's how you make saganaki cheese. after the oil boiling process, there's some residue at the bottom of the pot and i tasted it and it was pretty close to cheese... curious...
ps - segue is spelled s-e-g-u-e, lol. um, there was one morning when i woke up to it raining outside and there were goats on my porch area, just like 2 yards from my face. it was... entertaining. i put on my ipod and sang my heart out to numerous songs. the goats looked at me as if i were crazy. later that day, i showered in the rain because all my brothers were doing it. it was cold. 
thank you sasha for this AWESOME backpack. i literally go everywhere with it now! it's tougher than my jansport so it totally gets me through all the mud and bush car rides. plus, i look hipster. 
i have finally made my room more friendly by putting up pictures! im sure some of you will recognize your silly faces. i have tons of photos in a photo album too so that i wont forget you guys. and thanks cat for the subway map... helps me remember my roots and gives my siblings something to look at when they hang out in my room. it's fun explaining a subway system to them - cars that are underneath the earth that carry people to very far places... i should also thank kidd for the tshirt sent from taiwan, yuping for a postcard from taiwan, and vivi from when she was in america for her care package of goodies too. everyone is awesome!
i wasnt kidding about thorns on the ground, in the sand. everytime i take a short walk, i have to stop after awhile to scrape off the thorns that jam into my flip flops. one needs a good pair of flip flops (or really thick skin) to survive here. they hurt...
just some other thoughts...1. who thought tin/zinc roofs was a good idea? it couldnt be louder when it rains. you cant sleep through a war like that...
2. the MSG is literally killing me here. everything has MSG in it, and in turn, i crave everything. my body is slowly dying i tell ya.
3. most nights, i sleep under the stars. i forget how serene and awesome it is.
4. i think my gender equality work is working. my actions are actually rubbing off on other people. you always do a double take when you see men in this country do laundry. the other day, i saw my brothers washing their own clothes and the girls just sitting around. TASK COMPLETE! this happened too toward the end in my training village. my insistence that i do my own laundry has made the women realize that men are capable of doing their own share of work around the house. maybe i am making a difference around here...
5. some aspects of this culture are just simply awesome. i love seeing adults stick out their heads from their compounds, psst over a random kid from the street and order then to run to the boutique to buy something and bring it back. complete strangers! the way this society is run where any adult can order around anyone younger than them is phenom... the obedience and patience is phenom too.
6. sometimes, i think it's us americans in the peace corps that's keeping cultures surviving (big head syndrome). wolof is an unwritten language so it's passed down orally from generation to generation. especially in a country where the official national language is french and people are starting to use french more to work on the global market, i feel like people are moving away from wolof. you can tell how even now, french words are invading the wolof language. very few people speak pure wolof. i speak purer wolof than most people in my village. it's almost like a dying language. the other day after a rain and the sun came out, i asked everyone how to say rainbow in wolof and only dad knew. sad...
7. one evening, i spit a beetle out of my mouth. it was crawling around in the food and i guess i spooned it up.
went to dakar for some office work, to get meds for my staph infections, to take a break from village life, and to eat since ramadan has seriously starved me. i appreciate food more and more each day. my camera stopped working one morning. i will see if i can fix it. otherwise, it will be terribly depressing.
til next time!
Bring me eggplants when you visit pleasee!!
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