Happy Birthday to me

The daily charette selling fish. This is a healthy, beautiful-looking horse, unlike many.

When I turned 21 I was in Paris. My host family celebrated with a bottle of champagne and a delicious meal, then I went off to write my paper for finals. When I turned 22, I was in Colorado, finishing up college and wondering what on Earth I would do after graduation. On Friday I turned 23 in Senegal, and I went to the Magal Prokane. The Magal is a huge pilgrimage to Prokane, the natal village of Mamejara, the mother of an important marabout (though which one I forget). I met a few friends there and we wandered around the bustling market, similar to the weekly louma, only bigger, and with a higher concentration of religious paraphernalia: pendants with the faces of marabouts, posters, etc. It was cool to experience such an event, and everyone was really very gracious to us - lending a friend and I skirts and headscarves so we could go into the mosque, pointing the way to the well where Mamejara pulled water, the tree where she pounded millet. But as usual whenever I'm in a crowd here, it feels kind of funny, like a game of "spot the toubab", or like one of those pictures in the comic section of the newspaper, that maybe have a fish in a tree, or a fork growing among tulips, and the caption says "Five things in this picture do not belong." Yeah, if you took a picture of me, in Senegalese garb or not, I'd be the discrepancy you'd circle. One of the many things I'm slowly getting used to.
Anyway, as there has been a long blog-silence, you're probably wondering what I've been up to. Well, the girls' scholarship application has been finished and submitted; we'll know the winners in August inch'allah. My little pepiniere looks fabulous, with sacks full of little papayas, mangos, tamarind, nebedaye, and a bunch of others. I've even convinced a couple villagers to start their own, with the goal of planting live fencing when the rains come. Yay! The biggest problem I've had with it so far is the toads. They like to burrow into the wet sacks and ruin all my work. Not quite sure what to do about them. Peanuts are all done by now, for the most part, so when I hang out with the women it's to undo braids, drink tea, or occasionally prepare edible leaves for lunch or dinner sauce. There's been a lot of construction lately, which I like to do. At first people thought it was weird that I enjoyed the "tabar" - hut-building is men's work - but they're used to it now, and even invite me to come help out when a mud hut is being built. I definitely don't do as much work on it as they do, but I like getting my hands dirty and slapping wet dirt onto the bricks once they're laid. Plenty of the new houses in Keur Ali Gueye have my fingerprints in the mortar. Last weekend the Kaolack region had a meeting to try and formulate a distinct plan, with goals, for our region's development, and how we can work together across sectors. It was intense, but went really well. I think we're really getting somewhere. The meeting was held in a beautiful campement near Sokone, a town on the mangroves, where I demysted. It's good to get out to other parts of the country as well sometimes.