Two more weeks

After being very sneaky, I managed to catch this photo of mother and daughter at a wedding, watching the bride being blessed by the village elders.


My as-yet-unplanted pepiniere. I'll seed it with mostly nebedaye when I return to site, along with a little jitropha, and some flamboyant trees.

School is still out, so it's been awhile since Internet classes, but they're sue to start up again next week, once I'm back from our annual Agriculture Conference in Dakar. Which will also be good and an opportunity to eat tasty food. I realized, once again, how desperate my body is for nutrients, when I put away two brochette sandwiches last night. A single sandwich is half a baguette, roasted meat, french fried, tomato, lettuce, onion, and spiced mayonnaise; I ate TWO of those without pause. Wow. But, as I think on it, my caloric intake is so little, as every day I eat maybe a cup of rice, and another cup of millet, along with scraps of fish or vegetable or a little peanut sauce, and that's pretty much it. With the exception of the bad cookies I buy to stave off munchies on occasion. But soon it's mango season, which is a healthier way to indulge my sweet cravings. And now that school is back, I can get started on the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship, which will keep me busy. And better yet, in just a couple months the rain will come, and there is nonstop activity in the rainy season. My focus this year, I hope, will be on upland rice and beans, plus finishing the vetiver grass demonstration fields.
This week I finished preparing my pepiniere, which is a small tree nursery. Hopefully I can convince people to make ones of their own, too, as I have more sacks, but in my personal backyard I have 150 sacks stuffed with half-and-half sand and sifted manure. Next week I'll seed them and water them all, so hopefully every family can have at least one more nebedaye tree, which provides extremely nutritious leaves for "mboom" sauce. That will go well with everybody's new latrines!