Some Like it Hot

Me carrying water on my head. It's heavier than it looks.

Women pulling water at our well. It's quite a daily chore!

Just to clarify the record: it's hot here! I think every day gets over 100 degrees farenheit (I'll never get used to thinking in celcius; it's pointless to even try), which means I'm used to the way I look now with perspiration luminescent on my skin, and it's an average evening to sweat myself to sleep. But the odd thing is, I'm used to it. I who always hated extreme heat and cold, now consider it normal to bike along sandy roads in 100 degree weather. Life is weird. My bike seat, by the way, was designed by a sadist; it's really painful. This week has been a busy one for me. I just finished one school's scholarship applications, by riding out to visit each of the candidates in their villages, to see how they live and do a little personal interview. I really enjoyed speaking to each of them. These are truly inspiring young women who manage to get excellent grades while studying with the barest of amenities - no electricity to light their evenings, no running water, certainly not a balanced diet of brain food - as well as walking between 3 and 5 kilometers every day to school, and back again. Meeting girls like that makes me hopeful for the future, because if they continue to work as hard as they do, to get a real education, they will become the people who will change Senegal for the better. So, biking all over the department of Nioro, suffering my painful bike seat, to visit these students made up a majority of my week. I also visited a friend to see how her project of a cashew orchard is coming along, and to talk some more about the work I hope to do with a bookmobile. Finally, things are happening! My little tree pepiniere has sprouted, for the most part. I have some adorable little papaya sprouts, some jitropha that shot up like a weed (which, I suppose, it is around here, as well as a potential biofuel source) as well as nebedaye (a tree whose nutritious leaves are made into sauce), leucenia, and a few others. Hopefully they'll become hardy little seedlings that I can outplant when the rains come. So far nobody else has come to me for help with their own tree nursery, but I am continuing to talk to them about it, and maybe this week someone will get one started. A few women came asking me about my solar oven, too, so I will lend it out to them tomorrow to see how they like cooking with the sun. If it works well I'll have to figure out where they can buy them, or make their own.

Last week there was a wedding in the village. Well, not quite a wedding; there are various stages of getting married which I am not quite clear on. This woman already had her husband - and a baby son - but the ceremony was to send her off to live with him. I think he finally earned enough money to build her a house of her own in The Gambia, where he lives; until then she was still living with her parents. Anyway, the event was a celebration of all the things the bride would take with her to her new home. Everything was laid out in the courtyard: clothes, buckets, jewelry, fabric; all gifts from the villagers. Everyone dressed in nice clothes for the event, and one woman went to the center to display the gifts. She counted them out one by one: "One complet! Two complets! Three!" after each tenth item, she sang out loudly the number ten, and did a little dance, which was usually joined by one or two women from the audience. The bride ended up with something like thirty complets (matching skirt, top, & headscarf outfits), twenty pieces of fabric, thirty big buckets, fifteen small buckets, and I don't even know how many miscellaneous decorations and bits of attire and jewelry. After all the " baggage" had been displayed, there was a dance party. Though the entire village knew by then that I have a petit pagne (word gets around at the well; one woman finds out, they all do) it was the first time I really danced with it, and it was a huge hit. Everything I do or say is absolutely hilarious to most people here, especially when it involves me trying to fit in with my words or actions. The next day I was gone at a meeting in another village, but the bride went off to her new village while I was away. They all said she cried and cried, which I'm not sure whether that is a cultural expectation, or a true emotional reaction to the sudden changes and heading off into the unknown. Probably a little of both. Anyway, I wish her luck and happiness in The Gambia. At the very least, she'll look fabulous in all her new clothes, but that's small comfort when separated from everything she's ever known.