I made it back to civilization successfully. I just got back to Fort Collins about two weeks ago after completing my season in Glacier National Park.

The last few months in Glacier were great. Lots of time spent along the boundary of the park meeting property owners, talking to local hunters, and sneaking around in the woods looking for would be evil doers. For the last month and half of my season I moved to another area of the park and a more isolated ranger station. I had a four bedroom house and a ranger station all to myself. Pretty nice but due to the lack of consistent human interaction, internet, TV, etc. I started to talk to the squirrels and trees from time to time which was a little worrying. I was somewhat comforted that I never actually heard them talk back though. My time there often made me nostalgic for my Gambian days of sitting on the porch just watching the world go by. The difference being that in the Gambia you were never without someone ready for a good chat or a small child doing something entertaining. When I drove back into Fort Collins for the first time after a long empty drive though Montana and Wyoming I was freaking out and was sure I would be flattened by a speeding car at any moment.

I'm spending this month just studying for a Wilderness EMT course that I will be taking in Wyoming in January. Sounds like it should be a pretty intense course but I think it should be fun. The not so fun part is reading the one thousand five hundred and sixty-six page book that goes along with it and remembering from time to time that I actually need to retain a significant amount of what is on those pages. Takes me back to my college days. I pretty much ride my bike to a new coffee shop every morning and start reading. The number of coffee shops within a few minuets ride of my house is a little ridiculous and I keep discovering more. The crazy part is that they are all busy. I expected them to be populated with college kids and the like but a surprising amount of business deals go down at the coffee shop tables throughout the day.

I'm spending as much time as possible hanging out with Lydia. Six months apart was not fun and I wouldn't recommended it. Although its good to know that our relationship is strong as ever and can handle anything we throw at it. It's good to keep perspective as well, I have a lot friends and family that are/have been deployed to war zones and separated from their families a lot longer than six months. Lydia and I are headed to Guatemala in December over her school break. We're going to take Spanish classes in a town in the mountains. Should be pretty sweet and hopefully I can put my new found language learning skills to use and even dig down and find some of that Spanish that must be lingering in the depths of my head from high school and college. Anybody who has tips on Guatemala give me a shout, or if you know any current or former PCVs there we were thinking about hooking into the PC network.

Other than that I'm going to take some horseback riding lessons from a lady that has a farm near Fort Collins. I put an add on craigslist advertising odd jobs in exchange for free lessons and it seems to actually have worked. I didn't even get one response from a freaky psychopath. Knowing Craigslist's reputation I thought this might be a possibility but so far I have escaped unscathed.

That's it for now. Just a couple of new pics added. Need to download some from the camera soon. Back to the studying. Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

Well, it appears that I pretty much neglected the blog this summer. Sorry about that but there are a lot of mountain passes and forests that needed my full attention ;)

I can't even begin to tell the tail of this summer in this post. It's been pretty much one big learning experience. This job entails such a variety of tasks that everyday I run into something that I haven't seen or dealt with before. It's got me hooked and I look forward to doing this for a long time I hope.

Throughout the summer we had some pretty big incidents here in Two Medicine and other parts of the park. Search and rescues, man hunts (remember those guys who escaped from prison in Arizona), wildlife issues (Jack Hanna?), a suicide, car wrecks, etc. etc. Some of these ended well and I could go home feeling good about the whole thing. Some ended sadly mostly due to circumstances beyond our control. After those I would go home and evaluate how everything went. I always came away having learned something and impressed by my fellow Rangers.

The day to day stuff is just as interesting. Hiking the trails and walking the campground at night. Meeting people from all over the world who can't stop talking about how much they love it here and how much they wish they could be park rangers. I always tell them its easy just get rid of most of your possessions, take a big pay cut, and convince your family that moving every six months is a good idea and your half way there. The funny stories I hear and crazy questions I get asked never get old. I once sat next to a young couple near the lake one night as they discussed how they might start a campfire. Should they light each stick individually or put them all together and start them all at once. I think they settled on the individual stick method but I didn't think I could hold a straight face long enough to help them out. Somethings you just have to discover on your own. The completely serious questions about recent Sasquatch sightings were always good for a laugh. Welcome to your National Parks.

Living here in Two Medicine has been great. Surrounded by a ridiculously beautiful valley never gets old. The people that lived in out tiny community of about ten were great. Lots of great nights hanging out at potlucks and days off spent doing some epic hikes. I'm sure I will see some of these folks in the coming years. The Park Service is a small community.

Now as we transition to fall my job description transitions as well. My season has been extended so I get to stay into the fall and work on hunting/poaching patrols and some other issues that we have near the park boundaries. I have already started to work on some of this and it's a lot of fun. A lot of time in the backcounty and doing something that I see as a core ranger task of protecting the resource. I will be moving to another ranger station for the last part of my season so a new spot to explore.

I look forward to catching up with some of you and filling you in on the details this winter when I get back to civilization and my cell phone works again. Until then check out the new pics and keep in touch with an email now and again.

Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

The weather is actually starting to turn a bit here. But it sure isn't in any hurry. Were getting a lot more sun but still plenty of rain and the wind is kick'n.

I think I may actually be done with training for awhile. Its been fun but I'm ready to stay in my district full time and get in the mix of things. Last week I spent three days up at a backcountry ranger station called Goat Haunt. I was up there doing boat operations training. Great location and a lot of fun. To access the area you have to drive to Canada and then take a boat across Waterton Lake back into the US.

I've been spending all my weekends backpacking and getting to see a lot of the backcountry. Check out the pics for more. I've been coming away pretty much wet, cold and tired but the upside is that I've had most of the places to myself which won't be the case later in the season.

On a heavier note, several weeks ago I participated in a search and rescue for two days in the St. Mary district of Glacier. Unfortunately it did not end how we hoped it might. Take care in your summer recreation... http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/news10-54.htm

Check out the new pics. I apologize if I don't call/email often enough. If you do want to get in touch email is the way to go. Hope everyone is enjoying their summer.Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

Another quick update from Glacier. Things are going well aside from the weather. After about a week or great, sunny, warm weather we've been getting hit with some snow and cold rain over the last week and it looks set to continue for a little whlie anyway. I'm told that this is well within the norm so I guess I'll hold out for the sunny skies of July, a whole month away.

Working is still ramping up. Mostely training for now and getting orineted to the area. I've been doing a lot of feild training with some of the perminant Rangers. Just going out on patrols with them and getting to know the problem areas of our district and getting some real world experience on some of the things I've been training for over the last year. The end of this week is swift water rescue training which should be sweet and very cold I imagin. I have a dry suit which I tried on this morning and I feel like I'm being strangled by the neck gasket so I'm looking forwared to wearing that for three days. We will be down on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River for the training which is a very pretty spot which is popular with rafters and kayakers. After that its Bear Managment training for a few days. Basicly how to deal with all the bear/human interaction issues we have in the park. I know I'm slacking on the Ranger specific pics here and the full uniform pic is coming but in due time. I never seem to remember to get my camera out when I'm working.

The last few weekend I have spent in the backcountry. Two weeks ago I was down in the sothern part of our district out of the Walton Ranger station. I hiked for two days and never saw another person or a sign of another person. Its a pretty wild part of the park with little visitaion. Had a great time and stayed the night in one of the partol cabins. These are historic cabins that were put in place for Rangers on backcountry patrols and are still used today. This past weekend I spend in the northern section of the park bordering Canada along the Belly River. It rained on my most of the time but it was still a nice trip. This area supposidly gets pretty busy as the season picks up so I was glad to get to it when its quiet. I stoped and checked out the backcountry ranger station in the Belly River which is awsome. Its a seasonal post about six miles by foot from the road. They have quite a set up there, it reminds me of the homestead in Legneds of the Fall. Its staffed by two married Rangers. I wouln't mind spending a summer in their spot.

Check out the new pics and enjoy.Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

Well my dream of becoming a Park Ranger has finally been realized. I got a job in Glacier National Park for the Summer 2010 season. So far its been great and my district is amazing. I will be in the Two Medicine area which is in the south east portion of the park. There is tons of wildlife and great hiking here. I've already seen grizzlies, black bears, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer, ... the list goes on. Hopefully I can give everyone some more updates in the near future. For now there are some new pics on the side bar. Check them out. To see the web-cam on my house check this link. http://www.nps.gov/glac/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm#Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

I don’t think many people know the answer to this question. I certainly didn’t REALLY know what a ranger did until the last few years when I started to look into it as a career. Most people have the iconic image of the National Park Service Ranger in their head. The funny looking hat, the smiling face, the person who answers your questions about the best views and hikes, the guy who hangs out with Smokey the Bear and Yogi. Most of these are true to some extent but there is more to the story.

First off every person you see in a national park wearing green pants and a grey shirt is not a park ranger. There are lots of people who do lots of important things from maintenance, to fee collection who are not rangers. As far as rangers go there are two distinct types. The first one is the Interpretive Ranger. These people…. Interpret…. the park for all the visitors. They give lectures and lead tours talking about the history, wildlife, geology, etc. of the park. The second type of ranger is the Protection Ranger which is where I’m headed.

Protection rangers can have a whole host of job responsibilities depending on what park they work in or which specialties they choose to pursue. Their primary job is to enforce the laws of the park and protect the people and the things therein. A slightly ridiculous but somewhat useful saying about the protection ranger’s job says they should “Protect the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people form the people”. Most people don’t realize that rangers carry guns and carry out all the duties of a federal law enforcement officer in the park.

The academy here in Arizona, as well as all other seasonal academies like it around the country, primarily focuses on the law enforcement aspect of the job. It’s basically a police academy with a natural resources management slant to it. It includes all the traditional skills that you might associate with the job of a street cop. So far we’ve covered firearms, pursuit or emergency driving, defensive tactics, all types of federal law, arrest and detention, etc. etc. etc. Ranges also go after poachers and investigate archeological and environmental crimes among other things, so we receive training in those areas as well.

Although the analogy is useful in describing the training rangers aren’t nor would I like to be a street cop. I have no hesitation about doing what needs to be done when necessary but the main draw of being a ranger is the diversity of the work. In addition to the law enforcement aspect, protection rangers are the parks primary emergency medical providers (EMS). Most rangers are either first responders or EMTs. In some parks this is a huge chunk of their jobs since hospitals can be a long way off and getting to one often involves a helicopter ride. Hand in hand with EMS is search and rescue or SAR. Hundreds of people get lost or stranded in the backcountry of the parks every year. When that happens rangers go looking for them. In many parks rangers are the primary wildland and structural fire fighters as well. With all these responsibilities you could be out patrolling a camp ground one minuet looking for people doing something illegal, next thing you know you hanging from the bottom of a helicopter rescuing somebody from the backcountry with a broken leg and by the end of the day your putting out a brush fire.

And now for your enjoyment check out the video and pics below from the last few months.

Originally published at http://nasdrovya.blogspot.com/

My nephew Cole Timothy Garrod was born on Monday, September 21st. I'm so excited to be an uncle and very happy for my sister Cheryl and my brother in-law Tim. I can't wait to see him.

Looking back its been more than three months since my last post. So much has happened since then I'm not really sure where to begin. Life has obviously changed quite dramatically from our days in The Gambia. Some things for the better some for the worse but mostly things are just different.

Our last few weeks in The Gambia were filled with painful goodbyes for the most part. Friend after friend that we will most likely not see again or for a very long time came to say goodbye and give their wishes for safe travel. The worst part was the last few days with our host family whom we had developed such a close relationship with. Leaving a place that had become our home was hard but leaving them behind was particularly difficult. Since being back in The States we have talked to them a few times and the kids wrote us a letter but its not the same as sitting under the mango tree on a humid night talking about nothing in particular.

We left The Gambia on June 28th. Two years and 14 days after we arrived. Just going to the airport was something of a flashback since the last time we were there was the day we stepped off the plane from America in 2007. Ever since leaving I have been unable to mentally digest my time there. Mostly it seems like it never happened or maybe it was just a dream. There is next to nothing in America that would indicate that a world like the one I left exists, and its amazing how quickly I have been able to at least superficially settle back into life in The States. I would like to be able to look back on my time in The Gambia and fully understand its lessons and implications, but it will be a slow process over the next months and years.

Enough of that reflective stuff. It took me an hour to write those last few paragraphs with all the incoherent thoughts running through my head.

After leaving The Gambia Lydia and I took about a week to swing through Europe. We didn't have time to see too much but we had a great time. We met some friends in Amsterdam and spent a few days enjoying a great European city. Highly recommended for its laid back attitude and great sights. It didn't get dark till about 11pm each day so we took full advantage of the time and made it to all sort of museums and things. After we left Amsterdam we spent a few days in Brussels and Bruge, Belgium.

We arrived back in The States on July 4th. It was great to see all the people we missed over the last few years. We flew into Tampa to visit my sister and her husband for a few days and pick up our car. Ironically, upon returning to the land of clean and sterile, I spent the first night and next few days sick from an infected toe and going to the doctor. After I got the toe under control we had a good time just hanging out and catching up with Cheryl and Tim. After leaving Tampa we headed up through Florida seeing friends in Gainesivlle and Tallahassee along the way and then onto Shalimar to visit family and friends. We spent a couple of fun weeks in Shalimar hanging out and getting some good fishing time in.

As you know we decided Fort Collins was going to be our new home town when we got back. So, after a few weeks in Florida Lydia few out to Denver to meet her folks and search for a place to live in Fort Collins. After a little struggle to nail something down she found a little (quite little) place right in the part of town we were hoping for. David, Lydia's brother, and I headed out on a road trip with U-haul in tow and spent three days cruising various roadside attractions along the way.

Turns out Fort Collins is as sweet as we had been lead to believe. We have found no shortage of fun things to do from mountain backpacking, to numerous breweries there is no end. We pretty much walk, ride our bikes, or take the bus everywhere so its easy and low stress to get around but it's also not a big city which is nice.

Most of you know that I decided not to return to the computer field when I got back. I made that decision a long time ago and decided I would be a hell of a lot more fun to work outside and make a lot less money. So I thought being a Park Ranger for the U.S. Park Service would be a pretty good way to meet both those criteria. I'm looking to start that career sometime next spring so I jumped right into getting as much experience and certifications as I could.

After being in Fort Collins for just a few days I headed down to Boulder, Colorado for 10 days of wilderness medical training or Wilderness First Responder. The class was fun and the instructors were great. If your planning on breaking your leg or fracturing your rib while climbing in the backcountry I can help you out.

Next up on the list was wildland firefighter training in Salida, Colorado. One of the great things about being a ranger is the variety of things that your job entails. Emergency medicine, firefighting, law enforcement, search and rescue, resource protection, visitor education... the list goes on. Firefighter training was good fun and hard work and hopefully I will get to put those skills to use soon since I signed up with the country wildland fire crew in Fort Collins.

After that I had about a month break in Fort Collins in which I just tried to get things settled in while Lydia started working. It was nice to have the time to get all that stuff out of the way, it always amazes me how much there is to do to get settled in when you move to a new place.

That pretty much brings us to the present. I'm sure there were quite a few things I missed in there and this isn't the most exciting blog to read but I'm a little rusty and trying to play catch up. Right now I'm sitting in my temporary apartment in Flagstaff, Arizona. I'm here for about 3 months for a park ranger academy. Its one of the requirements to become a seasonal ranger which is the first step to becoming a full time ranger. The academy covers all sort of things from law enforcement skills, to legal and resource protection issues. So far its been fun and interesting and its been great to get to know all the other guys and girl( yes just one) in the class. We're together everyday all day so we all got to know each other pretty quick. The variety of backgrounds is amazing. Age ranges from 21 to over 60 and as many previous occupations and backgrounds as there are people in the class. If I can make time I will try to give some more details on the academy as I progress through it.

I guess that's about it. Sorry for all the boring details but I write this as much for myself to stir my memories down the road as I do for anyone who reads it. That being said I hope you enjoy.

Time is ticking by in the “Final Countdown!” Only a couple of weeks left here in The Gambia. Not really sure what to write about but I feel like I owe you something as things draw to a close. We (me and the 3 or 4 people who read this) have built such a close relationship over the last two years I can just drop off the face of the Internet now without saying something. Not that this will be the last blog ever but certainly one of the last, if not the last, from The Gambia

I’ve been running around trying to finish up a multitude of projects, paperwork, medical exams, interviews, and the never ending goodbyes. All of that looks as if it will continue right up until I get on the plane in a few weeks. No problem though, better than sitting waiting for the end.

In between all the other stuff we have been trying to spend as much time as possible with our host family and friends. Just hanging out, chatting, sitting under the mango tree eating the fruit as it falls, playing cards, cooking, and all the other things we have enjoyed doing over the last few years.

Trying to figure out what our game plan is once we return to The State is also taking up a good chunk of our time. Right now our plan is leave here on the 28th of June and then head to Brussels and Amsterdam for about a week for a short vacation to see the sights and visit some friends from Germany. When that’s all said and done its back to Florida for a few weeks to visit family and friends and begin the process of readjustment to American life. I’m not particularly worried about this part but everybody who’s gone though it says that its one of the most difficult adjustments of the whole Peace Corps experience. I guess learning how to use a normal toilet again instead of a pit latrine (glorified hole in the ground) can be more traumatic than one would expected.

After Florida its Colorado here we come! Lydia is going to fly up and look for an apartment and a few days later David, Lydia’s brother, and I are going to start what should be a sweet road trip with a U-haul in tow to bring all our stuff up. If you know of any must sees in Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, or Kansas let me know. These states may not normally be associated with the term “must see” but I’m sure there is some good stuff in there somewhere. The final destination is Fort Collins. Neither of us has ever been there but it sounds like an awesome town with the mountains right near by. We literally just looked at a map to pick out where we wanted to move to about a year ago. Since then we found out that it was a really good choice and are more excited about it every day. People ask us “why Fort Collins?” and we say “because it sounds like a cool place to live” and their reaction is usually something like “you’re not allowed to move somewhere just because you want to.” I’m like “what not?” This is followed by a few seconds of awkward silence.

What else can I say? I feel like I should have some profound words or a story to sum up the last to years. Like I’ve said before, there is no way I figure out how to put all that into words, maybe someone with a literary gift but not me. When I get home and you ask me how The Gambia was be prepared for a packaged response unless you have a lot of time on your hands. If you’re reading this and have been throughout the years that’s about as good as it’s going to get unless you have a specific question; like about how to use that pit latrine.

Well, I thought I was going on another survey trek this week but the cards were not in my favor. Not the end of the world though because I have plenty of stuff to catch up on here in Brikama. The last few weeks have been full. First, I was on another survey trek to the Tanji Wetland Preserve, and then it was off to our Close of Service Conference for the group of volunteers I arrived with, and finally conducting training for the latest group of environment volunteers on beekeeping, bio-char, and bio-digesters.

I know I told a few of you about the project I have been working on with an agriculture student at the college building a bio-digester. I thought I would write something up on it quickly so you could actually see what we’ve been up to.

First off, what is a bio-digester and is it supposed to be hyphenated? In our case a bio-digester is a device or structure that ferments biological waist in an anaerobic environment to produce, among other things, methane gas. That gas can be used for a whole range of things including cooking, lighting, running equipment, etc. For our purposes we’re only concerned with cooking. As for the question of hyphenation, I could use an assist from the English major crowd out there.

I heard about the concept of bio-digesters from reading on the Internet and talking with some other people who had seen them implemented in other places. I thought it would be an interesting thing to try out here in The Gambia since there is a major problem with deforestation due to people harvesting wood for cooking and there is no shortage of organic waste, namely animal dung. So, I started looking around for someone to work with and in the process talked to the head of the agriculture department at The Gambia College to see if he knew any students who might be interested in working on such a project as part of their final dissertation. A few weeks later a student came into my office and said he wanted to work on the project. He has proved to be a very motivated and determined individual and the rest is history.

I won’t bore you with all the technical details but we did some more research to figure out what type of digester we wanted to make and settled on a design from ECHO, a organization based in Florida. We wanted to build a semi-portable unit that we could use as a demonstration to get people interested in the idea and see where it would go from there. All the materials we bought locally and for less than $75 which we could significantly reduce the second time around knowing what we know now. We strung the whole construction process out over several weeks because we were working around two schedules but you could build it in a day if you had to.

So how does it work? I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.

Here is Malik, my counterpart during the construction phase.

Here is the whole digester (yes, I know its not the glorious), the left barrel is the digester, its full of a 50/50 mix of pounded cow dung and water, as the bacteria break down the dung the methane rises inside the tank and is forced out the clear hose. The drum on the right is full of plain water. The gas that is forced through the clear hose bubbles up through that water and is captured in an inverted trash can (you can’t see the trash can in this picture). The gas is kept there until it is ready for use.

Here is what the trash can looks like when it’s almost full of gas and floating on the water in the second drum.

Another picture of it all put together. You can see the trash can has a little bit of gas in it. You can also see our sweet prototype, shower head flame thrower attached to the orange gas output hose.

When we want to “charge” the digester by adding new waste we pound up some of the dung to make it easier to digest

Then we mix it with water

Then pour it into the input pipe on the first drum.

In order to add more waste we need to take some of the digested material out using this ladle thingy. This “manure tea” is great fertilizer for the garden.

This is another burner we made from a milk tin and a coffee tin. It worked pretty well but we have since made a better one from a single smaller coffee tin.

One of our first tests when we got something to burn. Fire! Sweet!

It’s been a great project. The Gambian TV station GRTS and a local newspaper have done stories on the project and Malik has made some great contacts with other organizations in the country that are interested in bio-gas. Most recently The Department of Energy invited him to help in construction of a digester they want to build in the near future. We did a demo for all the incoming PCVs during their recent training and it seemed to generate quite a bit of enthusiasm. Hopefully people will take the idea and try building some of the larger family size units in their villages.

It's been awhile since the last Blog and I’ve been getting some flack for it quite frankly! Not always the up front, in your face “Man, why you so lazy! Get off your ass and write a blog.” comments but often the indirect “I really like reading your blog, but haven’t seen anything new lately, that’s too bad”. I must apologize but life seems to be getting crazier, not less so, as we get closer to departure. I’m just glad some of you enjoy reading it enough to complain. This is a long and hopefully entertaining entry and it may be some time before I have time to write another so only read a paragraph every few days if you want to make it last.

Wildlife Surveys

A few months back I was looking for a new project to work on and was asking other PCVs to see if they knew of any or needed any help on projects they were working on. I was pretty lucky because one of our good friends that lives near by said she was working on a project with The Department of Wildlife Management to do biodiversity surveys in the national parks around the country and they could use some help. The idea of the surveys is to get a better idea of what type of wildlife is in the parks and in what numbers. Seeing as how I would like to go home and work for the park service and all this seemed like a great opportunity.

So the first one of our trips, or “treks” as we call them here, was a few weeks back. Each trek is about eight days long and we will do four in total before I leave in June. Our first trek was to Kiang National Park in the Kiang West region of the country which is pretty close to the village of Bambako, where Lydia and I first lived when we arrived in the country almost two years ago. There were eight of us all together doing the survey, three guys from the Department of Wildlife, two rangers from the park, and three PCVs.

The trek started out like all other trips I’ve talked about on this blog. A long, dusty, bumpy, overcrowded car ride and a few checkpoints later we arrived Dumbuto, the village that would be our home base during the surveys. It’s a nice small village on the perimeter of the park and another one of the volunteers that we were working with lives there so we had place to call home for a few days. The first day was all travel pretty much so when we got there we were all beat and just crashed. The next day was our first day of work, one of the PCVs who was training all of us on how to do the surveys lead a few classes in the morning on how the surveys would be run and what information we should record. I did some short lessons on how to use the GPS we would be using to mark sightings and observation areas and after lunch we all packed up the truck and headed to the first of our camps.

Each night we camped in a different place so that we could work right up until sunset and start working before sunrise. It was necessary to be close to where we were doing the surveys so we didn’t have to waist time traveling at these early and late hours. All the camps were pretty sweet. Some nights we camped in low lying areas near the mangroves, some nights on the edge of escarpments overlooking watering holes, and some nights just in the woodlands. I enjoyed all the spots but for the Gambians we were with some were more frightening than others. Many Gambians belief that the bush is very dangerous at night and most won’t venture out after the sun goes down let alone camp. The animals are one thing although there are very few animals in The Gambia that pose any real threat to people if you leave them alone. The more worrying things for them are of the super natural nature. I think the biggest worry of all the guys we were with was the “Dragons”. There are different places that they believe the Dragons live and when we camped close to one of these areas they were even more nervous. They say that if you see a dragon you will die instantly. There are other evil things in the forest such as elves and owls. The belief is that the owls are actually people with special powers, something like witches, that can turn themselves into owls when they choose to and may do horrible things. One night there was an owl next to my tent and I thought it was pretty nice but then I though that it must be a bit scary for the other guys. With all these perceived dangers of the forest every time we go camping, our friends and family think we are crazy. They tell us we are a bit safer though, because we’re white. They believe that we can see a Dragon without dieing and we are friends with the elves. Sadly, I must confess that I have yet to see a Dragon and have no elf friends.

We did see, hear and find tracks of quite a bit of wildlife during our trip. We saw warthogs, a big troop of baboons, various monkeys, mongoose and tons of birds. At night we could occasionally hear hyenas laughing in the distance although we never saw any. We found tracks, scat, and other signs of bush bucks, porcupine, hyenas, small wild cats, otters, and various others. One day when were camped on a hill overlooking a watering hole there was a big troop of baboons hanging out the whole day and I spend a few hours watching them through my binoculars (Thanks Ryan and Anthony). It was better than TV for entertainment value. They would get in fights and run off after each other and wrestle in the dirt. There was this big dead tree and it had one large branch that would bounce when one of them went out on the end of it like a diving board. They would all take turns running out to the end, bounce on it a few times and then leap off just for fun apparently.

We had some small animal traps which we would set every evening and check every morning. They basically look and function like the live squirrel traps you can buy in The States. We didn’t have the best of luck with them in the first few spots but in some of the later spots we started to catch a lot of mice. This in it self was not that interesting but one day we found a trap that was tripped with just a severed, bloody mouse head inside. This was a bit perplexing since I’m pretty sure mouse heads can’t walk into traps all by themselves. The best explanation we could come up with was that the mouse was probably eating the bait without tripping the trap and then some predator, probably a mongoose, jumped in and attacked it which tripped the trap but since the mongoose is pretty big relative to the size of the trap it managed to extract itself after dining on the body.

Almost every day was a battle with the bees. Since its dry season there is very limited water available aside from a few widely spaced watering holes. Bees seem to be able to find water as soon as it’s spilled and on the second afternoon we learned our lesson because when we were cooking lunch at our new camp we had some water we brought with us and some was spilled here and there while cooking or washing up. Shortly the bees showed up in large numbers and were swarming around our camp. Their not generally aggressive when their out foraging but when there are that many people and bees mixed together bad things are bound to happen. I decided I should take a long walk around this time but some of the other guys that suck around got stings and had to hunker down in their hot tents. After that day we had to work with the bee’s schedule. Since bees don’t fly at night we had to make sure our camp was packed up before sunrise and had to be very careful with water during the day and sometimes had to wait to use much water until after the sun went down in the evening.

One night we went out for a crocodile survey. We had a small boat and six of us set out from one of our camps on the edge of the creek at around 10pm to count and record the location of crocs along the bank. When we first set out the tide was too high to see the crocs well since they hide in the mangroves when the water is high. We spend the first two hours just cruising the river and it was so beautiful. Without any light pollution like you have in most places in the states the stars are crazy and the river at night is awesome. After a little while we just anchored and waited for the tide to go out. The boat captain not wanting to waist valuable fishing time passed around hand lines to some of us in the boat and we sat there and fished for awhile. I was slightly conflicted since we were supposed to be working and somehow we ended up fishing but I got over it. Of course because I’m a bad ass I caught the only fish of the night. All the other guys tried to tell me I was lucky but I refute this argument and say it was all skill. After a little bit of fishing we spotted our first croc right near our boat. It was hard to see them and we were using “eye shine” to locate them. Just shine a bright light into the mangroves until you see a pair of eyes. Most of the crocs we counted that night were small and a few medium sized. In total we counted seven throughout the night. We continued searching until about 2am when we had a small incident which was mostly the fault of the bad pilot. We were going up a small side creek and then a couple of guys were arguing that this was the wrong way and they decided they didn’t want to go up this creek so the guy started backing up but was out of control because the motor was too big for the boat and he wasn’t really focused on what he was doing. Right when we got some good speed up in the reverse direction some low hanging branches came into play and started to try to take various people off the boat. First the pilot almost got knocked out which caused him to swing the engine over and throw all the people on the boat out of balance. One guy fell over backwards and got his head and whole upper body dunked in the water until we pulled him back up. Then the pilot in an attempt to regain control of the situation decided we should go forward but didn’t take into account that at this point we were perpendicular to the bank in a very small creek. So, we proceeded to smashed head long into the bank. At this point we’re all yelling at the pilot who finally manages to get it together and get us back into the main channel. While this is certainly not something I would advise doing I personally felt this incident was not a night ender but it was the last straw for the guys who were already on edge about being in the bush at night and whom I later found out couldn’t swim. They talked for the rest of the trip about how they had almost died on the river that night.

So that was only the first of the treks. Three more are coming up in the next two months which should hold all sorts of new stories.

America

Talking to people in America makes me feel kind of strange, especially when it is someone whom I haven’t talked to for a long time. I realize this from time to time and I get off the phone and think I may have just talked gibberish for the last hour or if I did make any sense at all it was at most a ramble. Most of the Americans that I normally talk to are other PCVs and therefore fully understand the environment here and how it shapes your language and thought processes. When I start talking in Gambian English or throw in a few words of Mandinka here and there they don’t think anything of it but I fear that when I do this when talking to friends or family back home they probably think I’m going a bit crazy. I also feel like I can’t possibly convey a large part of what it is like to live here and what it’s like to view your own culture and country from the outside. I never expected that leaving my own country would cause me to analyze it so much. All the wonderful things about America seem so much more wonderful after seeing more clearly what is taken for granted there. The same amplification goes for some of the not so wonderful things which stick out more when viewed from this perspective. That being said there are many more good things then bad I can assure you. To further complicate things, to a small extent, you start to see America through the eyes of a Gambian who’s only source of information is international media, gansta rap, and 50th hand stories from somebody’s brother’s, cousin’s, uncle’s, etc. who lives in NYC. These stories distort reality to no end and depending on who you’re talking to America consists of streets lined with gold, people with guns everywhere, or black people who have spontaneously turned white upon arrival in the U.S. And even if I could get all that across it doesn’t even address the other half of the story; all the good and bad things about The Gambia and Africa that American’s aren’t generally aware of. Anyway I seem to have gotten off track somewhere (rambling?); my point is that if you think I’m losing my mind it might be a little bit true but it’s only temporary. When I get back in a few months you will have to cut me a little slack for a month or two while I get my bearings and figure out what all this means. But, in the end I’m essentially the same Ansumana… errrr… I mean Andy…. I always was.

Ebbe

Ebbe is D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S. What is Ebbe you might ask? Well that’s kind of a good question, the first thing I can say for sure is that its food, although some who find its taste more than disagreeable might disagree. It’s a concoction of many ingredients such as dried fish, cassava, palm oil, tamarind, hot pepper, cassava flower, some MSG seasoning, etc. I don’t know exactly the process to make it but I should find out before I go because I’m pretty sure you can’t find anything like it in The States. I eat this stuff as much as possible. Usually that means about 3 or 4 times a week. I consider myself a lucky man because my host family makes it most days and sells it out on the street. It’s a common food item seen on the streets in the evening. It’s scooped out of a big bowl and usually into a small plastic bag where the last few spices are added just at the time of sale and then the bag is tied up and you can take your tasty bag of liquid goodness along as fast food Gambian style. To top it off it only cost about 12 cents for the amount that I usually eat. Now with all these wonderful traits you might expect every PCV within ten miles of a bowl to be running to get theirs but this is sadly not the case. Those of you that know me might know that my taste buds are umm…not exactly sensitive and this is often cited as the reason that I can eat and even enjoy Ebbe. I strongly disagree. Even though Lydia and many others wouldn’t touch this stuff with a ten foot pole I think it’s awesome and I have a whole lot of Gambians on my side.

Ebbe is great as I’ve said a few times now but there are also a lot of fond memories that I will take back with me surrounding the eating of Ebbe. Kind of like sitting around drinking beers with good friends might remind you of college and all the good times, the evenings sitting out on the street with our host family and friends enjoying the fading light and the cooling of the day as the children play soccer or wrestle in the dirt are some of my most enjoyable memories thus far of living here in Brikama. During these evening we all just take our chairs out to the street and its one of the times I feel most a part of the community. I know pretty much everybody that walks by and say hello, I can talk with my host brothers and sisters is Mandinka and yell at them to get out of the way when an old man on a bicycle rides by. No matter what stresses the day brought on or how much I got hassled, watching the neighborhood slowly settle down for the day, with the burning red sunset and the evening prayer call echoing from the mosque in the distance always puts me in a good mood and makes me happy to be here. I think when you set out do something like move to Africa you have ideas about what it’s going to be like and what type of experience you might have, at least that was the case for me. But, as I have proved to my self time and again these pre-conceived ideas are seldom anywhere close to accurate. I never would have expected some of my best memories to come from sitting on the side of a dusty road eating puréed fish in a bag. Crazy!

Here's a clip related to the last blog. If you haven't read that one yet read it before watching this.

Well, last time I posted the Gators we were just about to dominate on the BCS and take the national championship. When your number one there’s no reason to gloat so I will just leave it at that and move on.

I still owe you at least one story from last December’s trip. This particular episode didn’t actually happen in Guinea but took place on our return trip from Basse to Banjul as we made our way back through The Gambia. In the entry about our trip to Guinea I said “The trip from Basse back home is a story for another day…” Well this is that story and this is another day.

We had a pretty ambitions plan to get from Basse to the capitol all in one day. Under normal circumstances it would not be too difficult to manage but we wanted to stop in a small village called Wassu on the way down country. I’ll get to our motivation for this stop later but logistically it meant turning what could have been a single car, eight hour trip into about a six car, seventeen hour journey. But seeing as how we just managed several 34 ish hour trips in the past few weeks it didn’t seem too daunting.

We got an early start from the Basse transit house, making our way down to the car park by around 6 or so. Pretty quickly we got a bush taxi to Bansang which is a small town on the south bank about two hours from Basse which serves as a small transport hub for the area. No major foul-ups on that trip and when we arrived in Bansang we again didn’t waist much time getting another car onward to the island of Janjanbureh, often referred to by PCVs in its condensed form, JJB. This island sits in the middle of the river and was a pretty big settlement back in the colonial days but is now just a lazy town in the provinces. The ride from Bansang to JJB is pretty quick but when you arrive at the south bank you have to get out of the car and wait for the ferry to get into action. This takes a bit so we just kind of hung around and after a little while we hopped on for the quick 5 minute trip across the river. Once across we found another car to take us across the island to the north bank where we got to hang out and wait for another ferry. Ferry by the way, in this case, means small barge that might handle two or three cars and a few bunches of people. It is powered by a single engine on one side and is guided across the river on a steel cable that runs from bank to bank. The most entertaining scenario occurs when the engine isn’t working and all the passengers have to collectively pull the barge across the river by heaving on the steal cable. The upside of this is you can save your eight cents in fare because they don’t charge when the engine’s busted. So we make it to the north bank without much delay but now we have to wait for another car to take us to Wassu. The problem with waiting for cars in some of these smaller places is you have to wait forever for cars to fill with enough passengers so the drivers deem it profitable to make a run. After sitting around for an hour we thought we were about to leave with one guy but managed to get in the middle of a big argument between some of the drivers over whose turn it was to take passengers. After a bit of yelling and jumping in and out of moving vehicles we were once again sitting on the side of the road waiting for another car. Luckily the driver who won the argument decided he didn’t want to wait around much longer so we were on the road again in about twenty minuets. Another hour down the road we hopped out in the village of Wassu.

Everything I have told you so far is to distract you from the main point of this story. Wassu has one claim to fame which is The Wassu Stone Circles. Some ancient rocks arranged in… circles. Anyway, I had already seen those and they weren’t too exciting to be honest so that was not our objective. A lesser known reason for going to Wassu is to meet a woman by the name of Fati Ceesay.

Fati Ceesay has played a small but interesting part of PCV’s lives for quite a few years now. I’m not exactly sure how long. A small but significant number of volunteers over the years have made their way to Wassu to get what are sometimes called Fula scars. Fula scars are something like a tattoo but sorta different. They are common among the Fula as a mark of their tribe but have also been adopted by non-Fulas as well. Lydia and I decided that we would like to get them as a reminder of our time here but also just… well…just because we thought they looked sweet dude! I realize I haven’t told you exactly what a Fula scar is but just be patient.

Once we jumped out of our bush taxi we set about finding Fati and her compound. We had very vague directions from another volunteer. Directions here tend to only really work when you already know where your going because it’s always something like “Turn at the third big tree, walk past two dirt paths, take a left near the smaller mosque, it’s the compound with a grass fence” Those directions could pretty much describe any place in The Gambia. One great advantage you have here over the States is that pretty much everyone knows each other so you just start asking random kids playing in the street and soon you’re on the right track with 20 or 30 personal guides. So after wandering down a few paths we found the right kid and were off on a short walk through the village to Fati’s compound. We arrived to find several older men sitting in the compound under the shade tree chatting away. They were happy to see us and knew why we had come but informed us that unfortunately Fati was not home. She had gone out to the rice fields for the day, but without skipping a beat one of the kids was dispatched on a bicycle to inform her that she had visitors from America! That’s right, were from America. So we just passed the next hour or so enjoying the shade of the tree and chatting with the Ceesay family. We finally met Fati when she arrived from the rice fields, she was a quiet older woman and she invited us into the house to begin the proceedings.

We went into the house and back into the bedroom where we were offered a seat on the grass mattress while she went and gathered her things. Lydia and I had already decided where we were going to get our scars ahead of time. Many of the Fulas get them on their cheeks or just below their eyes and it looks pretty cool but for obvious reasons that wasn’t a good option for us. I decided to get them on the right side of my chest on my ribcage and Lydia opted for the hip to counter balance her surgery scar from years before on the other hip. We explained this to Fati and she seemed to think those were good options. As you can imagine a hut in a small village in Africa is not the most sanitary environment to get a tattoo but we tried to minimize the possibility of infection in various ways. If I was me I would say we minimized our exposure and took a calculated risk. The process of getting a Fula scar is not particularly complicated and only requires several tools and ingredients. First off a razor blade which we bought at our local shop for four cents and brought with us so we could make sure they were new and clean. These razors are a bit flimsy and only slightly stiffer than a sheet of paper but good enough to do the job, what do you expect for four cents. The second necessity is peanut ash which Fati provided. Together those make up about 10% of the requirements. The other 90% consists of someone willing to get the scars and someone willing to give them.

So we had everything laid out and ready. We sterilized the razor blades with alcohol, washed everybody’s hands with sanitizer, etc. etc. We decided that Lydia should go first because there was a good chance that she would take off running and bail on me if she had to see it before she did it. We took a marker and marked the spot where she planned to get hers and then she lied down on the bed. The next few minuets consisted of Lydia squeezing my hand to the point of near fracture and a lot of asking “is it over yet, is it over yet.” The traditional configuration of the scars is two parallel lines about an inch or inch and a half long each so were not talking huge. The basic procedure consists of cutting into the skin with a razor blade where you want the marking to be and then rubbing peanut ash, which is a very fine black power, into the cut. The peanut ash is kept in a cow horn which looks a lot like a powder horn used with an old muzzle loader. The peanut ash has to be rubbed in pretty well so that it wont all come out as the cuts heal. So after a painful few minuets Lydia was done and still completely alive so we bandaged her up and then it was my turn. O ye and we got it all on video!

I was instructed to take off my shirt and sit on the bed so she could make the cuts. The cutting part wasn’t too bad overall. The blade was sharp so that helped but there was defiantly still a pretty sharp pain when the cuts were actually being made but it didn’t take too long and as soon as the cutting was over they pain pretty much disappeared. Like I said you have to rub the ash in pretty well so she started to pour on the ash and rub it in but she apparently didn’t think it was working too well because she asked me to kind of bend my whole body over so I could stretch the cuts open and she could pack some more ash in. Lydia thought this was a bit much and was grossed out, but if your gunna do it, might as well do it right. That was that and I got all patched up and it was finished. We thanked Fati and gave her the customary four dollars for her work (actually quite a lot of money here) and we were back on the path to the main road. Another good experience under our belt (more literally under our skin in this case) which we will certainly remember forever.

At this point it was about 3:30 in the afternoon and we were thinking the hard part of the day might be over but such was not the case. We got back up to the main road and hung out waiting for a car for a little while and managed to get a lift on a bush taxi going to Farafenni. As soon as we got out of town we thought it was going to be a quick ride but we turned into a road side sawmill and spend the next forty-five minuets sitting while they loaded up a bunch of wood for a carpenter. The sitting wasn’t too bad except for the sweat dripping down into our newly acquired wounds, particularly for Lydia who had the cuts on her hip sitting was painful. Underway again we made a bunch of stops to pickup and drop of people and things and then another stop to drop off the carpenter and all his wood. We made it to Farafenni in the evening and hustled it across this busy border town to the other car park to get a car to Barra which is where we could catch a ferry to the capitol. This is when things started to go…less great…we get to the car park and there is a car that they say is “about to leave” to Barra (they always say that) so we get in and sit down waiting for the car to fill and leave. Not much is happening initially but at some point our driver and another driver get into the second battle for passengers we have been a party to that day. This one was a bit more sketchy and consisted of two bush taxies jockeying for position down the main road and trying to cut each other off. Everybody got out of both cars about five times in between these road rage incidences and yelled and several other cars would stop and join in the yelling and one particular lady that ended up being in our car managed to, in an extraordinary display of stamina, keep yelling at the driver until we reached Barra at 10 o’clock that night (this woman managed to give Lydia a very big headache for which she was not thankful). So after we all almost die several times and a few hours pass things are sort of worked out and all of the passengers get into the most decrepit of the two vehicles. Off into the night we go. But, the car keeps breaking down and one particularly interesting ailment is the tendency of the headlights to go out at random, and when they do work they are less than blinding if you know what I mean. After several hours of this we almost run over a policeman/army man at a checkpoint and this begins another long roadside debacle. The police want to confiscate the car and leave all of us ride less, but as with most things in Africa things are open for “discussion”. Even way out here in the bush we managed to find some people we knew, some of Lydia’s former students from the college, to talk to while everything was sorted out. Lydia made the most of the situation and used our unscheduled stop to find a ditch to go to the bathroom in, when life gives you the near death of a police official make the most of it she says. Another hour or so later we reluctantly got back into the car and went down the road a bit more slowly this time.

Our rush was to make it the ferry before it stopped running to the capitol. There is no firm closing time and it can be anywhere from 7pm to 12am so you never know what your gunna get. We really didn’t want to spend Christmas Eve in Barra where our only lodging option would be the front steps of the police station or a brothel disguised as a guest house. So the whole day that was our biggest worry, if we would make the ferry or not. We thought we were screwed for sure after the near running over of the policeman incident. As luck would have it we rolled into Barra at around 10pm and the ferry was still there in all its glory about to leave the dock. We sprinted down the dock and were very happy to finally be sure we were going to have a good place to crash on Christmas Eve. We arrived in Banjul, the capitol, after the long cold ferry crossing more than an hour later. We walked toward the car park and past a big catholic church having their Christmas Eve service; it seemed like a different world when we peered through the door. The choir was singing and everybody was all dressed up, after such a trip and rarely seeing a church for the past year and a half I felt like an alien looking upon some strange happening. We pushed on and got a car from the capitol to the PC transit house. We finally arrived at around 12:30am and were thrilled to take a shower and pass out.

Over the next few weeks we carefully avoided washing our scars so that we didn’t wash out the peanut ash. It only took about two and a half weeks for them to fully heal and they look great and didn’t have any problems. Check out the pics for a before, during, and after look into the experience.

New pics are up to go with the last post about Guinea and also some others so make sure you don't miss any!

Well we started off the month of December with Tobaski festivities. If you will remember Tobaski from last years entries it is a big Muslim holiday where everybody goes to the mosque for special prayers and most families that can afford it slaughter a ram. This year went much as expected and we had an excessive amount of meat to eat over the course of several days. We came up with even more ways to cook goat and sheep and all was delicious but I managed to control myself better this year in the face of large amounts of protein and not eat so much that I got sick like last year. Anyway after that we had a few days to relax and then few days of work before we took off on our trip to Guinea

We have been looking forward to a trip to Guinea for a long time now. Ever since we heard about the awesome landscape of the eastern part of the country known as the Fouta Djalon we were pretty set on going there to do some real hiking, which we sorely miss here in the flatness of Gambia. So Lydia and I again set out on the dusty roads of West Africa to see what it had is store for us.

Our trip started out pretty mellow with a long day’s trip to Basse in the east corner of The Gambia where we spent our first night in the PC transit house and where we could get transport from the car park to Guinea. In Basse we pretty much rammed down some dinner, did some last minute rearrangement of our gear and crashed. There’s not much to do or see in Basse and since we have both been there many times and all our friends were out of town we didn’t feel like we were missing out on much.

Next morning we got up early and walked the mile or so down to the local car park. In case I’ve never explained before a car park is basically just a small dirt lot in larger villages or towns where all the bush taxis gather and you go to get a vehicle wherever you’re going. They can be slightly intimidating when your not used to them since there is usually a lot of madness, cars going all over and people yelling to try to recruit passengers. The one in Basse isn’t too bad and were pretty used to the routine at this point. We quickly found the car that would take us on the first and most grueling leg or our trip. We were there early and were the first passengers to arrive. Usually cars only leave once the car is full, there are no schedules and set number of cars a day or anything. So as you can see there is an obvious downside to arriving first because you have to wait around and just hope enough people eventually show up so you can get on your way. But in some cases there is a very big upside to being first. You can pick which seat you want. This was our number one priority on this trip due to the length of the ride and the type of vehicle. The cars that run this route are French made seven passenger station wagons that are very common in this part of the world. Sometimes they are referred to as Fula taxies due to their popularity on the long haul trips to Guinea and other parts of Africa that are predominantly ethnically Fula. Not being limited by occupancy laws or physics apparently we managed to eventually squeezed … wait for it… nine adults plus the driver that makes ten, four kids, and one baby into the car and just for good measure at any given time there could be between one and three guys riding on the roof on top of the luggage. That totals up to between 15 and 17 people being transported by a seven passenger car. Next time you go out to dinner try to double the rated capacity of your Honda Civic and see how many times all of your arms and legs fall asleep at the same time. So anyway we got there early because we wanted to make sure we could get spots in the middle row and pick the side where the seat looked most intact and supportive. This is also the best place as far as head room goes but I still ended up pulling an Ace Ventura with my head out the window for half the way to Guinea just so I could stretch my neck out, always on the lookout for the fast moving tree branch ready to decapitate me. After waiting around for about 5 hours we managed to collect enough people to fill the car up and the guys started to load all the luggage up. I still haven’t nailed down exactly why everybody going to Guinea always has a ridiculous amount of baggage but I think it might have something to do with things being more available in The Gambia or taxed less or something. When you see a car you can immediately identify if it is going to Guinea or not by the amount of luggage strapped to the roof of the car. Our haul was about average and at least doubled the height of the vehicle.

Around noon we set out on the road with thirteen of our new best friends and everything except the kitchen sink for our first stop, Labe the regional capitol of eastern Guinea. The rumors of this road before we set out and the memories of it now that I have traveled it two ways will haunt my dreams for many years to come. It was something like rally racing with an old car with way too many people in it. O ye… and it lasts 27 hours. Ye that’s not a typo twenty-seven hours. The first leg took us just out of Basse about two hours to the Gambia-Senegal border were we went through customs and passed into Senegal. The section of the road in Senegal wasn’t too bad, unfortunately it didn’t last very long and by late evening we were at the Senegal boarder with Guinea and checking into our third country for the day. Just after the road crosses into Guinea it gets a lot worse with major holes and ruts and all kinds of good places to get stuck. One thing that helped was that we were not traveling in rainy season which would have made things significantly worse. As we charged on into the night sleep was fairly impossible due to the road conditions but that didn’t stop me or my body from trying. I managed to smack my head on all areas or the car and people around me as I slumped from one position to the next but at least everybody was courteous enough to return the favor. At some point around 2 or 3 in the morning we stopped in a small village because the driver needed sleep. Lydia and I spend the next few hours walking around in the dark to get the blood flowing in our legs and sitting by a small fire trying to keep warm since I have apparently lost all ability to survive at temperatures below 75 degrees and I didn’t have very warm clothes. That being said the night was beautiful and sky was crisp and clear. It was defiantly one of those moments when I had to stop and make my self realize where I was and what I was doing. Pretty amazing stuff. After catching a few hours of sleep the driver woke and we got back on the road. Most of the trip was a blur due to the lack of sleep and constant smashing of my head against the seat in front of me but as we got closer to Labe the road become more vertical and we began to go up and down switchbacks and as the sun came up we could see some wonderful vistas of rolling green hills. We eventually arrived in Labe around 3pm and extracted our selves from the car. After a quick ride to the other side of town in another car to the other car park we quickly found another car to our next destination. This time luckily only an easy hour away. We arrived in the town of Pita which was pretty much our last significant town before heading to the village where were we planned to spend most of our time. Again we went to the car park and found our car which took some time to fill but we managed to finally get going out of Pita around 7 or so that evening.

As painful as the first leg of the trip was we can say that we were lucky we didn’t have any serious breakdowns. The cars are so old and over used that they tend to have what you might consider pretty major problems pretty often. Along the way I noticed that most of the drivers carry slightly more then your spare fuse in the glove box. The inventory in our car consisted of among other things, a spare drive shaft and a spare axle. Well as soon as we were out of Pita we hit our first problem. The lights went dead and the engine cut off before we even really got on the bad road. Over the next thirty minuets they managed to get the car started/pushed up a hill to the side of the road where they could replace the battery which of course we conveniently carried a spare for in the trunk. Once we got that fixed we only got another 20 minuets down the road and we all had to get out again while they repaired something with the rear axle. Back on the road again which by this time and location in the trip was very windy, rocky and hilly we made it a little further until we ran out of fuel. This is when we learned the engine got its fuel from a 2 liter jug under the hood with a hose in it and this jug had to be refilled quite often to keep us going. It was around now that I decided I was even more happy it was a diesel engine lest we meet a fiery death. We carried on with frequent axle fixing and fuel jug refilling stops and what was supposed to be a 1.5 hour trip turned into a 4 hour trip that was actually pretty entertaining. The biggest highlight was trying to get up the really steep rock covered slopes. The clutch was so bad that it couldn’t hold under much pressure so it couldn’t handle the weight of the fully loaded car on the steep slope. Usually we could make it by making three or four running starts and zigzagging our way up but on one particularly bad hill we all had to get out and help the car up by pushing it. At about 11:30 that night a good 35 hours after starting out we dropped on the side for the road in the village of Doucki. Almost at our destination we walked the last 2km to the camp we planned to stay at, navigating a rocky road by moonlight in our flip flops, and had to wake up Hassan (our host) so we could get a place to sleep. At this point despite being extremely tiered we really (really) needed a bath because we had so much dirt on us that you could probably measure it in inches. Alas, Hassan said the well was far away and there was no water available but he would get some first thing in the morning. Although the look of disappointment in Lydia’s eyes was clear I was secretly quite excited I could go directly to bed this dirty without being yelled at. Off to sleep, and oh what wonderful sleep it was.

This little camp we stayed at is run by Hassan Bah. He started out life as a mechanic and lived in Sierra Leone for some time after leaving his home in Doucki looking for work. He then got a job as a sea going mechanic working in various places including Morocco, Spain and Holland for eight years before coming back to Doucki. In his time abroad he managed to learn English and Spanish in addition to the French and Fula which he already spoke from living in Guinea. Sometime after returning to Guinea he met and worked with some Peace Corps volunteers working in the area and took them on hikes in the surrounding area to show them around. After the volunteers realized how cool the place was one of them suggested to Hassan that he should lead hikes in the area as a guide. Long story short, Hassan worked with one of the volunteers to develop the camp and get the business going and today it’s a Peace Corps success story. Always good to see one of those. Hassan is an awesome guy and always getting into new things. While we were there I gave a few impromptu computer lessons since he was learning how to use the laptop he had just gotten a few days ago.

We spend five days at Hassan’s and loved every minuet of it. The area is awesome with some great trails and more waterfalls then you can figure out what to do with. Everyday we went on one or two hikes ranging in length from 2 to 8 hours and sometimes did a few in one day. On pretty much every hike there were multiple opportunities to swim in cool pools of water in the river or under waterfalls. There were two hikes in particular that we both enjoyed the most. The first left from the top of the Plateau and he called it Shoots and Ladders. We descended into a large canyon which is about 1500 feet deep. Once on the bottom we crossed though some pretty sweet jungle and saw a troop of baboons just off the trail. The trail back up to the Plateau went through a very narrow slot canyon where there was a stream running down and you had to climb up rocks and lots of improvised ladders to make it up. These are trails that have been in use forever and are still in use as normal routes for locals traveling between villages. Another cool hike he called Indiana Jones, which took us thought these huge rock formations where a lot of vines were growing all over the walls and water ran between some of them. It was a pretty surreal place and the name was right on the mark, something from temple of doom, complete with swinging on vines and eerie caves and lighting.

In the evening we just hung around and chatted with Hassan or some of the other guests and enjoyed the cool evenings. We met a cool guy from Arizona that was on an extended trip of Africa. We all agreed it was good to see other Americans traveling since it seems to be a rarity, especially in out of the way places. Come on people get on it, the world awaits you! He also gave us some Tobolerone chocolate which we never get so we were pretty thankful. Lydia carefully guarded it against melting any further or other possible disasters for the rest of the trip.

Unfortunately the day finally came that we had to head back and face the long road in reverse. The trip started out pretty smoothly and we made it all they way to Labe without any major problems. Partly due to it being a downhill journey this time. Once in Labe we headed to the car park once again and found our chariot awaiting us. This time we weren’t first but close enough to get some good seats. We spend the next four or five hours waiting around for more passengers and for the guy to work on the car. We should of known that this amount of work just before a long trip is a bad omen but we didn’t put all the pieces together (get it?) and if we had it’s a good chance the next car would have been just as bad but anyway we rolled out of town in the late afternoon once again fully loaded. I wont go into detail for our time in this car but lets just say the trip from Gambia was a cake walk in terms of mechanical problems compared to the trip TO Gambia. We had all manner of things breaking and innumerable stops on the side of the road or at the road side “mechanic” shops (guy with a hammer, metal bar, and wrench). Anyway it all came to a sudden end sometime the next day on a dusty road in Senegal with a loud bang and several pieces of metal left behind the car on the ground. The source of these pieces of metal is still now unknown but the result was immediately clear, the car wasn’t going anywhere on its own. Now we just sat or lay in the bush for awhile hoping somebody might come along and tow us but even when we finally got a tow it only lasted for a few kilometers before the other driver was to worried about damage to his own car and left us for the hyenas. Finally a big truck came along. There are a lot of these big trucks that travel between Guinea and other areas carrying goods. Its like a cross between a semi and a Jeep. There pretty sweet and can deal with the bad roads pretty well. We all climbed into the back of this cattle truck and paid the driver a little bit to take us all the way to Basse which luckily was on his list of destinations. We proceeded to get even more covered in dust and this portion of the trip will definitely go on my list of most interesting travel stories. All I can say here is it involved a lot of praying to Allah by the other individuals in the truck, a border crossing, some bad French (the language not the people) and another arrival after dark.

After we finally made it to Basse that night we were starving and very very dirty. We went to the transit house and washed up then rode some bikes over to get some chicken and beer at a favorite PC spot. Best beer and chicken EVER. Even though I only drank one beer I almost didn’t make it back to the house once the effects of sleep deprivation combined with the alcohol. Needless to say another night of wonderful sleep. The next day we woke up and as always here I have my shortwave radio within arms reach. Being a lazy morning after a hard trip I flick on the radio and tune to the BBC without getting out of bed. First thing I hear is that there has been a military coup in Guinea. Nothing like good timing I suppose. From what I could tell we missed it by about 12 hours. Such is life in Africa. Hopefully it will turn out ok and so far at least it doesn’t sound violent. We spent the rest of the day just hanging out in Basse recovering, doing laundry and getting things in order.

The trip was great in spite and likely because of all the figurative and literal bumps along the way. We saw some great places and met some cool people. Both on the way to Guinea and on the way home we met and got a chance to know some great Gambians who were traveling to visit family in Guinea and were always willing to help us out with anything they could. Thanks.

The trip from Basse back to home is a story for another day and also quite interesting but i'll have to wrap it up here. If you made it this far into the story I commend you on your commitment to reading and wouldn’t want to push my luck by writing much more.

We spent the Christmas holiday in the capitol hanging out with friends. Nothing too special just some good food, a few movies and a pretty good party that the Brits threw at the British High Commission. I just told them that my bother in-law is from England and they let me right in…crazy. We missed all you back home and hope your holiday went great. Next year we will celebrate Christmas in the decidedly cooler climate of Colorado and your all invited. See ya!!

I wouldn’t say that last week was a typical week as a PCV but I think it shows a little something about the lives some of us lead. Last week was a very busy one and it’s a great example of the variety of work you can get yourself into if you’re not careful. When I came here one of my goals was to slow down and see what life was like at a more relaxed pace. In some ways that has happened, there are days I can sit on my porch or under the Mango tree for hours doing little and fully enjoying myself. The other side of the coin is how much I realized I enjoy days full of things to do and while the week was exhausting it was none the less a lot of fun and fulfilling.

So last Saturday (the 11th) was a big match between the Gambia Scorpions and the Senegal Lions soccer teams. This is a big rivalry so it’s always a huge game. The sad fact is that Gambia almost always loses. So the odds were already stacked against The Gambia but to make it worse it was an away game held in Dakar, Senegal. By halftime the score was still tied 0-0 and as we went into the second half Senegal scored their first goal. This was expected and some thought it was the beginning of the end. A bit later Gambia came back to tie the score at 1-1 and held fast to the end of the game. That’s right they didn’t win, they just tied the game. This however was enough to cause much excitement with everybody out in the streets cheering and so on. So, that evening the president announced a public holiday for the following Monday. Yes, a public holiday for a game we didn’t even win. To make this a bit more ridiculous we lost a match on Sunday which kind of put a damper on the Monday holiday. Anyway I’m telling you all of this not only because it’s pretty funny but also because it meant I didn’t need to go to work at the college on Monday.

Monday:

Over the last few months I have been helping another PCV design a solar system for her family’s compound in a small village south of Brikama near the Senegal border. There is no electric utility in this village so if you want electric light, solar or a generator is pretty much the only way to go. What we came up with was nothing too fancy just enough to run around 12 lights throughout the house during the evening. So we had the design and had done all of the price checking up in the capitol over the last few months and since I had this whole “holiday” with nothing to do we thought it would be a good time to go buy the stuff and figure out how to get it down to her village. Sometime in the morning we headed up to the capitol and did our shopping which went surprisingly smoothly. After that we even found a taxi for a decent price to get the equipment back to Brikama. Once we got to Brikama we had to get in touch with our friends host father who was bringing a donkey and cart up from Busura to pick up the equipment. So as usually things tend to take a bit longer than expected. The trip by donkey cart takes about 2 hours and he was supposed to have left about 2 hours before we got to Brikama. In actuality he probably left Busura about when we got to Brikama is my guess. So we sat on the side of the road with a solar panel and all its related accessories getting interesting looks from passing locals. Eventually they arrived and we loaded up the donkey cart with all the goods and gave special instructions to be very careful on the way back. The road in a muddy and rutted track though the bush and we didn’t want the solar panel to meet an early death. From there I bid the donkey and his solar equipment farewell until later in the week.

Later that evening I got home and hung out with Lydia and the family for a bit and had some good dinner. One of my coworkers from the beekeepers, Kaybe called me up and asked me if I could help him with some bee hives at the Director of Forestry’s house. The director has been trying to help us out with getting some things done at the beekeeping center and our center is also on forestry land so it was pretty much a necessary move on our part to help this guy out. Anyway, he’s a nice guy and I’m not one to pass up beekeeping. So around 8 that evening we headed over to this guys house and suited up to check his hives. A few had fallen over but mostly everything was intact and we spent about an hour and a half working on the hives. After that it was home, bucket bath, bed.

Tuesday:

Tuesday it was off to the Beekeepers. Most of the morning I spent working with some of the employees on stuff for the up coming trade show. We worked on getting our brochures and honey labels finished up and ready to print. The other half of the morning I spend arguing with the guys who are supposed to install our water pump and tank. This is something I have been working on for a year now and they finally brought the stand and the pump that morning before I had to go. After talking with those guys and showing them where the equipment was going to be I headed for the capitol for the second time in two days to get our stuff printed for the trade show. Once I got there I spent about an hour wandering around trying to find this guy’s house that was going to do the printing. Eventually I found it and we went in so I could show him the documents that we wanted printed. The printer is Nigerian guy who runs a printing and designing business out of his house. Just going in his house was strange because it was all nice with real couches and a TV and all. In his office he had nice computers and printers. After living in a house with no running water for a year and a half it’s strange to go into places like that. The guy had a look at the docs and said he could print them so I could come back later in the day and pick them up. I left and headed for the PC office where I had to do a few things on the internet, check my mailbox, and send off our ballots for the upcoming election. A few hours there and then it was back in a taxi to the Nigerian guy’s house and then another walk and a taxi ride back to Brikama after grabbing some quick grub.

Wednesday:

Wednesday I went up to the college and was expecting a meeting with Mustapha and some other guys about a new database the college wants to make to store all its grades and student info. I think it’s a great idea in theory but I don’t know if people will take it seriously and realize what must be done in the way of maintenance and backups if you’re going to put all your data into an electronic database. Also, in a place where the power goes of a few time a day and is sometimes out for days it’s not a stretch to think we might have some problems with having everything on the computer. Anyway the meeting never happened and was rescheduled for next week. Mustapha and I worked on some other random things. We tried to get some networking equipment repaired/purchased, and did some things to get ready for all the new students coming in this term. I also met with the student I will be working on the biodigester project with. We found a place on campus that we could safely store all our equipment and a good place to put the digester once it’s finished. He also typed up the introduction to his dissertation on the biodigester project, which I have somehow agreed to be his advisor on, and gave it to me so I could go though and make suggestions. As you well know if you read this blog I can’t even spell so I don’t know how qualified I am as an advisor.

I managed to make it out of the college by about 5 and went home to chill for a bit until around 6:30 when I had to meet Kaybe back up a the college to take care of some bees that had made their homes in various structures around the college. There are about six or so hives that are causing some problems around campus and the college hired NBAG (the beekeepers) to remove the bees. Most of them are in these overhang support structures that are on all of the buildings and some of them are in the minaret of the mosque. All of them have been causing people alarm at some point or another. It’s difficult to pray when your being chased by angry bees. That night we decided to tackle three of the hives. We got there just about sunset and got suited up. The plan was to kill the bees and then break open the boxes they were in so we could clean out all the combs, honey and dead bees so that no bees would come back again. After we begun working on the first hive it became apparent that there was no way we could open these boxes up. They were sealed with hundreds of screws and the plywood was three-quarter inch. This is one of those times that I wish I had the tools I have in America. What I wouldn’t have done for an electric drill. I’ve never even seen an electric drill here, much less a cordless one. In the end we had to just spray enough pesticide in to kill off the bees and then seal the box so nothing could get in. The plan was to let the bees all die off in the next few days and then have the carpenter open up the boxes, clean them out and then seal them back up so the bees couldn’t return. The second hive took us up to the second story of a building with a similar style box. Not much more luck getting into this one so we went with the same technique as the last one all while standing on a table and the edge of the balcony. We finished that one off and moved on to the third and final. This one required scaling up a shaky scaffolding to a third story overhand. About this time it also started to lightning all around and the wind picked up a bit. It was at that moment, watching Kaybe head up the scaffolding in his bee suit looking like a space man with lightning flashing around and bees all over us, that I thought some people might consider this kind of crazy. Needless to say we tried to work quickly but carefully and finished the last hive without any disasters. By now it was about 10 at night and the rain and wind were getting going in earnest. Kaybe got on his motorcycle and I got on my bike and we both proceeded to get very wet on our way home, not that I wasn’t already soaked from having two shirts and a bee suit on in the 90 degree weather. I got home exhausted and went straight to the back to take a shower in the rain. The rain shower was very relaxing and a good way to end the night. I went in, had some dinner, drank some homemade hooch and passed out.

Thursday:

Thursday gave me a chance to catch my breath a little bit. I went up to NBAG to help Gibbeh, our accountant, make a new spreadsheet to keep track of honey sales. She is all about it and picks stuff up quickly so she’s easy to work with. We continued our prep for the trade show as well. Bakary was running around filtering, bottling, and labeling honey so we would have good stuff to put on display. Kaybe was making beeswax candles and Kehta and I were trying to figure out a good way to package some of the candles and make pendants out of these little wax figures we had a mold for. It seemed like a slow day but four o’clock came quick. Once I got home Lydia and I packed our bags to head down to Busura for the night to install the solar system. The bike ride takes about an hour (significantly faster than a donkey you might remember) and is a beautiful ride though the bush. Lots of nice trees and very green and lush, especially this time of year when all the crops are ready to be harvested.

Friday:

We woke up Friday morning and Lydia had to head back to Brikama after breakfast so she should be at the nursery school later that morning. Our friend, Sunkary (Gambian name), her host family, and I started to work on the solar system just after breakfast. Our first task was to rip out the remnants of an old system that was there. There was a small panel and two other even smaller broken panels that we took out along with a dead battery and a bunch of wiring. We had some wooden frames made for the new panel and the one we were going to recycle from the old system and installed those on the roof. Then we got the charge controller and new battery put in place so we could run the wires down from the roof to the charge controller. It’s when we started to run the wires down from the roof that I did some acrobatics to get into the “attic” and discovered that it was somewhere around 120 degrees in there and pretty damn dirty. I went in only slightly sweaty and pretty clean and came out 15 minutes later soaked and covered in brown dirt. And so I would remain for the next two days. We got the main components hooked up so the battery could start to charge and then we set about the task of rewiring/installing lights throughout the house. All the old lights had to be rewired because they wire used originally was too small and there was a major loss in the wire from one side of the house to the other. We spent the rest of the day running wire and installing lights and switch boxes and got into a pretty good rhythm and Sunkary got the hang of it so we started to move faster but in the end we only had 5 of the 12 lights done by the end of the day. Somehow I thought we could get the whole thing done in one day but some of you may know that I have a tendency to underestimate how long things might take (No the trail head is just around the next corner!; No just 5 more minutes of fishing we can make it back before the kayak rental closes!; etc.). Well, guess what? Africa is the perfect place for me in that case because there is nothing that cant be pushed back a day or two in order to finish what needs to be done tomorrow. That being the case we just planed to continue on tomorrow and we finished up for the day as the sun went down.

Saturday:

We woke up and got back in the same routine Saturday morning. Wiring, some dirt and sweat, some more wiring, a little bit of rice, oil and some water, more sweat, a bit more wiring, etc. All the while we have a big crowd watching and again again I found myself wishing for a Home Depot when we would run out of something or have to improvise a tool again. We managed to get done around 4 in the afternoon and I packed up and headed for Brikama with Lydia who had ridden back down to Busura that morning to hang out and join me for the ride home. That night we finally just hung around the compound with the family and took it easy.

Sunday:

Finally I make it here to today. This morning we woke up and did our laundry so we could hang it up and let it dry for the whole day and then around noon we headed up to the trade fair to give our support to my fellow NBAG coworkers. The fair was nice and our booth was pretty impressive but they could have done a better job advertising for the whole event because the attendance has been pretty bad so far. It goes through Wednesday so hopefully it will pick up in the next few days. Now were back at home and I’m writing this excessively long blog.

This week had many of the components of my service that I will surely miss once I leave Africa. There are always a wide variety of challenges; technical, physical, and cultural. From one day to the next I go from living in the 21st (or at least the late 20th) century working on a computer network to riding a donkey cart or doing beekeeping which has been practiced in this part of the world in some form for thousands of years. The African rain “showers” behind my house, rides through the bush as the sun sets on the rice fields or behind the giant silk cotton trees. These are some of the things I will remember when I’m gone.

New pictures today! Check them out.

The rain continues to fall here in The Gambia. Time and again we think its finished but this last week in particular has proved otherwise. Pretty much everyday this week we have had a major downpour. One particularly bad storm last week knocked out some key power grid components and put us in the dark for a little longer than normal. We still don’t have power at the college after a week. These storms at the end of the season have a lot more wind, thunder, and lightning and tend to cause quite a bit more damage. When roofs are either grass, palm leaves, or corrugate a strong wind can cause a lot of damage. This morning I noticed the roof of the mosque at the college was peeled back like a sardine can sometime in the last week. Even our sign at the beekeepers, which is made of square tube and sheet metal, was flattened in the night.

I know its been some time since I last wrote. Looking back the last your heard was about the trip to Mali. Seems like that was months and months ago. The day after we got back form out trip Ramadan started, so we were all fasting from then up until last week. If you want more info on the Ramadan and fasting activities go back and check out some of the posts from last year from mid September to mid October. This time around it was easier for the most part. I guess knowing what to expect made it go smoother. Of course the fasting was a challenge I thought I would try out for a few years while I’m here in the Gambia and I’m glad to say that two years is enough and after successfully going a month without water or food from sunrise to sunset for two years in a row I can say the challenge has been met and I know what those people are going though. Check that one off my list. It has certainly been an interesting experience and I get a lot of respect from Gambians for taking park in the fast. It is difficult to explain to them that I’m not a Muslim and am simply fasting to see what the physical aspects are like. Fasting and praying during the month of Ramadan are deeply religious acts for Muslims so it hard for Gambians to separate the two and often they don’t understand when I say that I don’t pray. Usually it leads to a discussion in which I try to explain that there are many different religions in the world not just Christianity and Islam and furthermore there are many people that don’t subscribe to a religion at all. This whole thing usually ends in stalemate but its none the less interesting.

At the end of Ramadan is Koriteh which in The Gambia is celebrated by getting all dressed up in new clothes if you can afford them and going out to see all your friends and walking around the town or village. It also involves some tasty food and a few days off of work. We partook in all of the above and it turned out to be a pretty relaxing couple of days.

During the holiday and over the last week or so we have been doing a lot of beekeeping. Were trying to get ready for the new honey season which should get rocking in about two months but the bees will be building up their hives between now and then. We decided to clear the apiary during the day one day last week. As I have often said on this blog, African beekeeping is always done at night due to the extremely pissed off nature of African honey bees. Well we thought they wouldn’t be too mad since we were just clearing around the hives and not actually opening them up but we were wrong. After about 20 minuets in the apiary the bees were so viciously attacking me that it felt like a windy day from all the airflow generated around my head by the swarm of bees. It took us about an hour and a long walk through the woods to get the bees off of us so we could finally get out of our suits.

One interesting aspect we have been working on is trying to fix a hive condition called cross combing. This is where bees build their combs in such a way that it makes it difficult or impossible to harvest the honey. We spend an hour or more on just one hive the other night experimenting with a way to cut the comb out and reattach it so that the bees will begin to build their comb as we would like them to. We will get to see if our work pays off in the next few weeks when we go back and see what that colony is up to.

Were also working on a way to capture wild colonies so that we can take colonies in or on buildings and in the bush and get them to colonize a hive box we provide for them. This is a pretty big challenge because you have to trick the bees in to leaving their nice cozy home and setting up shop in a brand new spot. It looks like it will take a lot of time and monitoring and I’m not sure it’s necessarily practical in our situation.

I got stung right in the nose the other night. You can imagine how that looked after a little while. That bee must have been waiting for just the right moment when my nose touched my veil and nailed me. I think my immediate comment was something along the lines of “@#$#*@&! right in the nose @#$@$#@$”. I guess that’s another one for the storybooks.

That’s it for now. More again sooner or later. Hope everybody is doing well!

Well were back in Gambia and back to work after a great few weeks on our trip to Mali. I don’t know have much detail I will get into here but I will try to give you a rundown on our journey. Check Lydia’s blog also as she has a good post about the trip as well.

Our trip was almost exclusively took place in buses, cars and trucks and consisted of quite a long haul over bad west African roads in bad west African cards. That being said I will say that the transport in the better traveled areas of Mali was surprisingly good. Much better then in The Gambia anyway but once you get off the main track it’s the same old story. Our trip took us over thousands of miles of these roads but even though the travel was always uncomfortable and often painful it was a lot of fun and seeing what we saw was surely worth it.

We started out our trip prepping here in the good old home town of Brikama. Becca our traveling companion came over the day before and we got all our stuff packed up for an early start the next morning. The next few days were spent in transit (as were many days) to Mali from the Gambia. If you look at a map you can tell that its some distance before you actually get to Mali from The Gambia. We spend another night in Gambia in the far eastern town of Basse which was our jumping off point for Senegal. It took us another day to get to the largest settlement in Eastern Senegal which is known as Tambacounda. This town had little to see other then our first encounter with Lydia’s favored French colonial relic, the patisserie. After that it was on to Mali. The next few days were almost non-stop travel to the capitol of Mali, Bamako. The scenery was pretty nice much of the way. Once you get into Mali things start to open up into savanna and you have long views in all directions. There is also some topography here which is a departure from what were used to in The Gambia which is flatness. The villages along the way also changed quite a bit, mainly in their construction style. Most of their buildings are all mud with flat mud roofs which is suppose is due to the lack of grass which is what many roofs in The Gambia are made out of. Once we left Senegal we just took buses and cars non-stop until we arrived in Bamako late in the night and crashed on a porch after having some trouble finding accommodation at the late hour. Anyway it provided an interesting story with a moral, If you ever find yourself without a place to stay ask if you can sleep on someone’s porch and you may get lucky.

Bamako was our first major destination on the trip. It’s a big busy city of a little less then 2 million people set along the Niger River. We enjoyed walking around the different sections of the city and markets. This is where a disease which I am not familiar with started to take hold of me. For those of you who know me I’m not the type to buy souvenirs and things like that when I go on vacation and I never expected to do it this time with the possible exception of a few things for friends or something. Anyway Malians make so much cool hand made stuff that is practical and useful and that they actually use daily that I found things that I just had to have. If its one thing I have a weakness for it’s the practical and useful. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one with this problem and needless to say we had extra baggage on the way home. At one point Lydia and Becca found the ‘fetish stall’ section of the market where you can buy your very own rotting monkey head or other suspicious looking items to include in the ritual of your choosing. Lydia and I took a rainy afternoon to go check out the Muesee National which was amazing and I felt like I was in New York not Mali. It was very well designed and put together and had some cool exhibits on Malian culture and history. Reading all those little plaques gave us plenty of French practice too.

Next stop was Segou which was a nice little quiet town also set along the Niger river that is about 4 or 5 hours east of Bamako. We didn’t do a whole lot here except relax and enjoy the layed back mood. We walked along down the by river which had some nice views and a busy little fishing/cargo port. Here we stayed in a sweet little hotel and got what was to be the first of several discounts along the way just because we are Peace Corps Volunteers (‘Corps de la Paix’ in french).

After that we headed to Mopti and Sevare which are right next to each other but Sevare is where we spend most of our time since it was way more chilled out. Here we found one of our favorite places to stay on our whole trip. There is this little hotel run by an American man that has lived in the area for a long time. He is probably in his late 50s and was actually born in Mopti the son of missionaries that arrived in the 20s. Anyway the place was a good location to stage our travel to Dogon country and to recoup for a couple of days here and there when we were passing through. The food was great with huge breakfasts and dinners all served just like at the farm with everybody sitting around one big table and bowls and plates being passed all around. (I assume this is how its one at ‘the farm’). We wasted a few days here trying to get to a near by town called Djenne which is supposed to have one of the oldest mud mosques in west Africa with some interesting architecture but after a failed attempt and about 6 hours of waiting for a car that might be going to our destination without success we decided that it probably looked like a lot of other mud mosques we had seen. Since none of us are particularly history buffs we decided we could probably let this one slide.

The next big adventure was heading out to Dogon country. This area is a few hours ride from Mopti and consists of a long (around 100km) rocky cliff area. In this area the Dogon people have lived for the last 1000 years or so I believe. They build their villages very close to or on the cliff which was originally for protection from other warring tribes and animals. They have a very interesting belief system and cultural but the most interesting thing for me was just to see the villages and how they were build on the rocks. There are also some remnants of dwellings left by the people that inhabited the area before the Dogon. Some of their dwellings are so high up on the cliff it’s hard to believe they could ever get to them. We hired a guide and spend quite a while in these villages and hiked on foot throughout and stayed in different villages each night. We seemed to get rained on each day but it wasn’t so bad because it cooled everything down but sometimes it caused instant flooding and we had to camp out for awhile while we waited for the rivers to settle down so we could cross them. Dogon was surely one of the highlights of the trip.

:-)

After Dogon we went back and spent some more time relaxing in Sevare and gather up all our things that we had left there so we didn’t have to take them hiking with us. From there we pretty much made our way back home as fast as possible with the exception of another prolonged stop in Bamako for a final relaxing few nights in a nice hotel. We even went out for dinner at a nice restaurant and had a bottle of red wine. Crazy! Hadn’t had anything like that since we left the states. Our return route pretty much took the same path and was mostly uneventful except for the inevitable breakdowns and getting stuck here and there. My favorite was the old truck we took from Veligara in Senegal to Basse in Gambia. It was a small old pick up truck probably from the 50s or 60s would be my best guess. The back had some wooden slats in it and we crammed about 14 in the back and another 4 in the front and an additional 3 or 4 on the roof with the luggage. During the two hours or so we were in this vehicle we had to stop to fill the radiator about 3 times, blew out a shock so they had to rig something with a pipe and some rope to keep the tier from rubbing on the truck, and finally every time the driver was in a low gear and the transmission popped our of gear the apprentice kid who was riding on the roof had to jump down and crawl under the car to push it back into gear.

That’s about it for our trip. I’m sure there is more I might think of later. New pictures of the trip should be up later today so check those out. Hope to hear from all of you soon. Send your comments if you got em.

That's right folks its vacation time. After a year+ here we are going to take some time off of work and see check out some of our neighbors here in West Africa. It won't be your classic relaxing vacation but it should be a lot of fun.

Our main destination is Mali with a few brief stops in Senegal on the way there and back. For those of you who don't know much about Mali you can check out the link below. Its a big country and much of it is desert but I has some amazing history/culture and some cool natural features.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali

All this week has been something of a blur. Somehow I managed to have tons of work related stuff going on along with the preparations for this trip. Trip planning was a pain because we had to get approval from Peace Corps to travel and get papers signed and get travel documents ready and convert between three different currencies etc. I think at this point we pretty much have all that worked out. The only thing left is to learn French between now and Saturday. Ha!

At the college we had our official launching of the "new" network and Internet connection. We had a ceremony with all these dignitaries and donors. It was poorly planned but somehow turned out pretty well. This was just the official launching but the network and the Internet have been pretty much operational since December-ish. Its amazing that this project was started by the previous PC volunteer at my site and this phase is sort of finishing up just now. If you want to get an idea of how hard it is to get these types of things done here consider this. What took us (PC Volunteers, The College, various donors) 3 years to do could have been done in the states in maybe two or three weeks.

At the bee keepers we finally moved into our renovated building after some work was quickly done by the contractor over this past weekend. We also now have a generator so we can use the computers at the office for a few hours a day. This should help with overall productivity since before may people were working out of their homes at it was very difficult to communicate and keep everyone on the same page. We also started again on the well project that has been hanging over my head for the last year. The well diggers are deepening the well so that hopefully when I get back from this trip we can get the pump installed. We now have a nice new sign by the road to attract more attention and went crazy planting a bunch of trees around the place a few weeks back. Mangoes, Cashews, Mandarin Orange, Lime, Guava, Kaba, Sour and sweet sop, Japanese plum, and passion fruit among others. Were also looking into doing a new beekeeping training program nation wide but its unclear if its going to work/be a good idea.

The mango wine is DELICIOUS! After it sat and fermented for a total of about 4 weeks I siphoned off everything but the bottom goop into bottles. I tasted it at that stage and it was a bit of an ass kicker. Tasted something like grain alcohol with a hint of mango. Well after letting is sit another week in the bottle it is way better and actually tastes like wine. Now I will admit that its been more than a year since I have had real wine so my perspective is probably somewhat altered but I still say its pretty damn good and pretty sweet to make your own booze. We are going to leave most of it to "age" until we get back from Mali and then I will start thinking of what the next batch of wine might be.

For the last 40+ years or something Peace Corps has been sending volunteers all over the world Newsweek magazine. In some cases volunteers have little other source of world news other than shortwave radio broadcasts like the BBC or VOA. Well, due to budget cuts they notified us a few weeks ago that they were canceling the Newsweek subscription for all volunteers. Seriously, I make $200 a month and you can't spare me a magazine so that I might at least stay up to date on current events. I have pretty decent access to the Internet at least a few times a week so I could probably stay reasonably well informed but I will still miss the in depth things and finer points that I get from Newsweek. And I'm one of the lucky ones. There are plenty of other volunteers that live out where they go weeks or months without outside news so their pretty much screwed. Now, I'm acutely aware that I'm here on the dime of the U.S. Government which gets its money from you, the tax payer. I take that responsibly seriously and try to do my job well and I think at the least my being here somehow contributes positively to America's image abroad, however small that contribution may be. The point is I don't think that Peace Corps is a great contributor to national debt and particularly not a few thousand Newsweek subscriptions.

Anyway that's about it for now. Look for some exciting stories of Mali in early September. Later!

As I sit typing this we wait for another potential flood. Now that I have my laptop here at the house I can type away when the moment hits me even if disaster lurks just around the corner. It’s been raining since around 10:30 this morning and its now about 2:15 and still coming down. The street is more flooded then I have ever seen it. There were actually kids swimming in our street. It’s even worse than last time when our house flooded but luckily the new block wall around the field behind our house is holding so we haven’t been inundated yet. We did however discus our plan of action should action be necessary. We moved some things off the floor and the shovel and rice bags are on standby ready to be made into sandbags for the back doors. Several of our neighbor’s hoses have already flooded and I went walking around to a few of them to see if I could help out. So much water its amazing it all came from the sky in just the last few hours. These types of days always start out so normal. Lying around reading a book thinking what a nice relaxing Sunday it is and then somewhere along the line things change or it suddenly becomes apparent that we might have a problem. For now we just hope the wall holds and are glad the rain is here so the crops will grow.

Not sure if I have mentioned before that I am in the process of making Mango wine. Readers of the blog will remember the cashew apple wine that I made earlier. That came out pretty good after a few tries but was a bit simpler because it used mostly natural yeasts and sugar and I just had to squeeze the fruit to get the juice out. For some time now I have been planning to make mango wine since there are obviously a ton of mangos around. I had planed to go to the fruit market and by a bunch of mangos but as luck would have it the day I was getting ready to make wine a commercial farm near Brikama donated a bunch of mangos to the college and I got a while crate of mangos for free. Sweet deal and what good timing! The other ingredients were water, yeast and sugar all of which I could find locally as well. My plan was to make it in a 10 liter jug that I got for this exact purpose so the first step was to cut about 18 mangos up into little chunks and put them into the jug. Then I filled the rest of the jug up with the sugar, water, and yeast. I made an air lock for the jug so air could not get in but the gasses from fermentation could get out. I cut a small hole in the lid of the jug, pushed a tube into the hole and then sealed it with candle wax to make it air tight. Put the other end in a jar of water and voilla you have a check valve of sorts. Anyway up until this point everything was going pretty smoothly. I took the jug and put it under the bed so it was out of the way and it was bubbling away quite rapidly. Lydia questioned why she had to have the strange bubbling science experiment thing under her side of the bed but it was only because it was easier to get to there. After a little while I walked into the bedroom and realized there were no more bubbles and the jug was looking a bit more rounded if you will. I felt it and it was getting pretty hard so I figured there was a clog in the pipe. I took the pipe out of and blew into to clear the blockage and as soon as I too my mouth off a lot of pressure along with some mango puree shot across the room onto the wall, clothes, ect. This was not part of the plan. Apparently with the rapid fermentation the whole mango mush/water combination was expanding quite a bit and the jug was no longer big enough. I opened up the jug and immediately a bunch of mango slop squirted out again around the bedroom. I took out what I thought would be enough of the mango and water to allow it to continue on the way and sealed it back up. Well I guess it wasn’t enough because about an hour later Lydia called me in from the porch and said she heard a loud noise from the bedroom. I went back there and there was water and mango sprayed around the room near the jug. I guess what happened is the pipe clogged again and then was subsequently cleared again under great pressure which shot stuff all over the place. At this point I decided to switch an open bucket with a rag over it and let it get through the rapid fermentation. Since then it been going pretty well. I left it in the open bucket for about 4 days and then squeezed out the mango pulp and put the juice back into the original jug and its been sitting under the bed for about a week with no explosions so far. Another few weeks and we can taste test it.

The last two weekends we have been out running around doing stuff with other PCVs or with the 4th of July stuff or whatever but it was great to hang out and relax at the compound this weekend. We have been just reading and chatting with our host family and whatnot. Lydia decided she needed to learn more technical skills (think napoleon dynamite) to balance out her creative/artistic side and for practical use so we started going through the some books to get some ideas. We started with navigation yesterday. We have a compass, map and a ruler so she would read about some topic and then we would talk about it and then I showed her how to plot a course, plot location, and work between magnetic and true bearings. It was fun in a nerdy sort of way. She has a whole list of things she wants to work on from knots to wiring.

That’s it for now. Any questions?

Here is a short video of our street beginning to flood about an hour before our house did.

Hey everyone have a great 4th of July. Here is a little clip to crack you up. This is one of the little girls in our compound playing with a shaker Lydia made. I wish I was so easily entertained. It took forever and a day to upload so I hope you like it.

So how is everybody doing? As is becoming the norm its been awhile since my last blog and a long while since my last significant blog with much worth reading. Lydia has surpassed me in blogging as of late and she has a great way of telling stories so make sure you keep checking out her page as I slowly drift off into obscurity. I'm still banking on the possibility that once I can write my blogs at home or whenever the inspiration hits me I will be back to my old self. My tired old laptop will arrive in the next few weeks so we will see.

This past Saturday held an interesting surprise. I got up to work out in the morning, took at bath, ate breakfast, etc, Just like any normal Saturday. I was sitting on the porch with Lydia watching one of the first heavy daytime rains of the year come down and everyone was enjoying what can for some in the country can be the difference between eating well and being hungry. No doubt we need a lot of rain for the rice, p-nuts, ect. but we ended up with a tad too much. My host brothers had gone and barricaded the door to the compound on the command of my host father. The Idea was to try to stem the flow of water rushing in from the street which had by this time turned to a river. This was the first indication that the rainstorm might yield something out of the ordinary. I climbed up on a pile of rocks at the corner of the compound to look over the wall with my host father and the entire street had turned into a rushing brown river. The street has always been a bit of a river during heavy rains but it never looked like it did this week. After some time I got down and was sitting on the porch when my host father asked me to look behind our house to see if the water was rising. Sure enough just about the time I got to the back door water was beginning to gush in around the sides of the door. First we tried to open up the drain hole in the wall at the end of the house with a pick axe and then we did that in a few other places around the compound to help the flow of water but that helped only minimally since basically a big section of the neighborhood drains into our street and has nowhere to go. So at this point all of our host family and then some started helping us move everything out of the house. We had to take pretty much every item onto the front porch or raise it up somehow. The bucket brigade went on for quite some time while we tried to win the battle with the water. Bucket after bucket was shuttled out the front door and into an area where it could drain away. While all this was going on a bunch of other people from our neighborhood who were also trying to save their houses/belongings were out on the road with shovels and pick axes trying to undo the major technical flaws that were put in place when a "storm sewer" was recently built by the main road. The first time I have ever heard of a sewer actually making drainage worse. That combined with the destruction of a wall that normally kept some of the water out from behind our house were the main causes of flooding in our house I think. Once some of these problems were fixed by bruit force and the rain let up a bit the water began to reseid. That's when we all started to win the war with the water in the house. After we had cleaned up as much as we could with buckets our host family and us started to rip up the flooring (which i hated anyway) and mop up the rest of the water. Its was pretty awesome how everybody helped us out. You would be surprised how quickly 20 pairs of hands can finish a job that would have taken Lydia and I a few days. We went from the beginning of the flood to most things being cleaned up and put back in the house in about 5 hours I guess. Pretty crazy. At that point we figured that everybody was tired and the rest of the day, including our host sisters nursery school graduation thing, was shot. But no, somehow my older host sister managed to keep cooking during the flood. Lunch was served on time and we headed out to the nursery school shortly after. Just another day in The Gambia. When you grow up and live in a place where there are no civil engineers (think drainage plan) and no emergency response teams you basically band together solve problems as they are presented in the most direct way possible and move on to the next thing. I never saw anybody feeling sorry for themselves during this fiasco just determination to solve the problem. We were the lucky ones. The compound behind us ended up with chest deep water in their house and many things ruined. Our plan is to make up some sand bags and keep them on standby in case of another problem.

After Saturday we enjoyed a basically relaxing Sunday with some left over clean up and had another PC friend over for dinner in the evening. This week is going well and pretty busy. Lydia in particular seems to be running around in many different directions with exams at the college and work continuing at the nursery school. The college was out of internet access the early part of this week (more on that later) but we found plenty of things to work on around campus. Getting the last of the computers into our domain and things are running smoothly. Funding has finally been secured for our irrigation system along with some other things at the beekeepers. So after a year we are back in talks with some contractors to install the rope pump and tank. Hopefully you will hear more about that in the next month but the best laid plans get sidetracked in The Gambia. Over the last month or so I have been talking with a Agriculture student in his last year at the college about doing a project for his final paper. I was interested in building a bio-digester to produce bio-gas so I talked to the head of the agriculture department and told him to send anybody who might be interested to see me. The student seems very smart and motivated so our plan is to build a semi-portable unit that will be build from locally available materials (probably 55 gallon drums) and will produce methane cooking gas by fermenting cow dung. The idea is to use the unit we build as a demonstration to show the concept to other agencies and or individuals that may be interested in building one or making a business or development project out of it. The Gambia has a major problem with deforestation which is largely due to harvesting of firewood for cooking. The vast majority of Gambians, I would say in excess of %90, cook over a wood fires or charcoal. These are plenty of goats, sheep, and cows around and not much of the dung is used for anythings so it has the potential to be a good fuel source in the right situation. Like I said its a demo so we will make it and see where it goes from there.

Question: What do you think it would be like if the internet went out for several days in all of America? Seems like a crazy question and if it did actually happen it would probably trigger an economic slide of monumental proportions but its unlikely to happen so no worries. Starting this past weekend (due partly to the same storm that flooded our house) the Internet connection for the whole country went out. It was out for 3 days. There is basically a single point of failure for all the internet connections in the country. When that goes it all goes. Apparently this time a bridge fell down in the storm and was lying on top of the cable so that was hindering the effort.

This weekend we are going to go up to the capitol to celebrate the 4th. There should be quite a few other volunteers in town and there are rumors of a softball game being planned so it should be fun. The new education group of PCVs is also coming in tomorrow so we will have a chance to meet them. That was us a year ago. Congratulations to Mark and Jenn on their wedding. Again, sorry we missed it, I'm sure it was awesome. I hear my dad made a great speech at the wedding. Can anybody YouTube that for me?

Today being Friday the 13th of June is not only scary day when Freddy Krueger comes out to wreak havoc but also happens to be the day in between two other very important days in the history of the world. Yesterday was my birthday which of course you already knew. Thanks to all those who sent birthday wishes and/or gifts. To answer the standard questions: No I don't feel any older and no I still don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up/with my life.

The other day of note will be tomorrow, June 14th, our one year anniversary in The Gambia. One year ago tomorrow we arrived in Africa direct from staging in D.C. In some ways it seems like its be awhile since I left the states. I miss family and friends, good food and beer, weekly fishing trips, etc. But in a lot of ways it has flown by to the point that I don't know where all the time went and how I can possibly only have one year left here and what can I get done in that amount of time. I was just reading back through some of the old blogs and could not believe all the stuff that has happened thus far. Pretty amazing. I hope that the coming year will be as interesting and educating as the last one and I hope you continue to enjoy the stories on this blog.

On a more serious note I would like to bring to the attention of the public the potential dangers of sitting under a mango tree. Last night at approximately 10pm GMT Lydia was viciously and deliberately attacked by a mango tree and a fruit bat working in conjunction in the village of Brikama, The Gambia. The victim was sitting under the tree at a local establishment enjoying a beverage when one of the local fruit bats after having finished the choice part of the mango cut it loose from its high altitude perch and sent it plunging though the canopy. Lydia didn't have time to react but only to hear the horrible sound of the mango plummeting though the leaves before taking a vicious blow to the left thigh. This is not an isolated incident. I have nearly been a victim many times myself and have seen many a sole suffer similar fates. You may think your enjoying a relaxing break under a nice shade tree but aren't you really just playing Russian roulette? The victim is recovering and will, as a public service, post pictures of the wounds at a later date.

Not sure what else I can tell you now. I need to get back to work. One of our friends parents is visiting soon and they are going to bring my laptop with them so hopefully that will help with the blogging. I can type stuff up when I'm not at work, more inspired, or more focused. Anyway hope everybody is begining to enjoy summer. Talk to you soon.

Man I don't know what it is lately but I just can't come up with good stuff to write about. For weeks I have been trying to come up with something but no luck. Luckily Lydia has been covering for me by keeping you entertained and informed with her blog. Now for some random thoughts...

The other day one of our neighbors slaughtered a goat and gave us some of the meat. This is pretty cool since we don't get real meat that often so I was pretty excited. They guy gave Lydia the meat in the morning just before she left for work and she put it in a marinade to soak for the day. When we got around to cooking it that night Lydia was trying to cut up the meat into smaller chunks and I was sitting in the chair just laughing because she get so freaked out by raw meat. In addition to regular meat they gave us a little bit of every part, intestine, heart, liver, etc., this didn't seem to help her disgust with raw meat any and at one point as she stared down into the bowl poking a piece of meat with her knife she says "Dude, there's like a ventricle or something."

Yesterday our host mothers "sister" got married. I say "sister" because the definition of sister, brother, mother, father, etc. are much different here than in America. For instance there are about 5 different relatives or non-relatives that could be considered your sister. Anyway there were about 30 women singing and dancing in our compound during the afternoon and evening. The part that was held in our compound is pretty much a woman only affair so I just sat under the mango tree with the other guys drinking attaya (tea), eating mangos, and trying to keep a low profile. The wedding last two days so there will be more going on today although not in our compound. Lydia was more involved and went to all the proceedings yesterday so she will probably have to fill you in on the details a bit more.

Work has been going about the same. At the college we have been doing a lot of work at our other campus in the capitol which is good but also a pain in ass because it takes us about an hour and a half get there if we can even get a vehicle then we have to rush through our work to get things done. But its coming along well and we should be pretty much wrapped up with things there in the next month or so. The beekeepers is going well. We finally started our tree nursery which some cashew trees and soon some citrus trees. Construction continues on the buildings at our main site and also at the two rural honey processing centers that are being build for rural farmers to use. We hope to spruce things up once the construction is complete and hopefully attract some of the tourist market as a kind of eco-tourism stop.

Our compound is getting bigger and bigger. We now have neighbors living in the rooms on either side of us which just about fills all the empty rooms up. I would say there are about 50 people living there now. It takes some adjustment when each new family comes but mostly we live in amazing harmony considering the number of people and the close quarters. My tree planting project in the compound is going OK is suppose. I have had about a 50% success rate up to this point which is ok I suppose. There are a lot of obstacle to getting from seeds to full grown trees that you probably wouldn't have in the states. First off is the Chickens. We don't have any goats right now and their the worst but I wasn't expecting the chickens to be a big problem but they like to dig in the dirt looking for bugs and stuff so they have destroyed a few trees that way. The other problem is the small kids that don't appreciate that a portion - however small - of their former play area is now a tree nursery. Not the end of the world. I figure if a few of them live to maturity I'll be happy. At least I'm teaching my host brothers some discipline by having them water everyday. HaHa

You never would have guessed but the about half way through that last paragraph the power went out for four hours. Have you ever tried to run an IT shop with no power? Surprise, its not possible. We always have some magazines or books on hand for just such occasions. Lydia was here waiting for it to come back so she could send some emails. She stuck it out almost the whole time but decided it wasn't going to come back so she headed home and about 10 minuets after she left it came back on. Needless to say after riding here and back in the heat and not getting any work done only to have the power come on just after she left she didn't see the humor in the situation.

Random meats are quite interesting and usually tasty in my experience. In addition to the more usual fare of goat, sheep and beef since living in The Gambia I have had a chance to eat some rather unusual meats from a western perspective. Mongoose - delicious, pidgin - had a lot of salt but seemed pretty good, Giant bush rat - delicious, funny looking sea snail thing - a bit strong tasting but OK. As a side note I have been devouring oysters like crazy lately. There so good and you can get them super cheep. These ladies sit on the side for the road at the waters edge where the shuck oysters. There are huge piles of oyster shells all around them. The oysters are a small variety and they are delicious when you cook them up with some butter and garlic.

Thats all for now. But wait there's more...New pictures should be up later today unless the power goes out again.

Last week I attended the Afro Forestry IST or In-Service Training. The training was held in various spots in the western division of The Gambia. We worked on all kinds of things but Ill cover the highlights of the week.

The first few days of the week were dedicated to beekeeping. Since I have been working with NBAG and beekeeping for the last 9 months or so most of the material covered wasn't new to me but it was still good to talk to other people about their bee projects and learn some new things in that realm. Those days were pretty long since we would get up early and head out. Sessions and work all day then we did the beekeeping training at night and didn't get back to where were were staying to after 10 most nights. I guess the best part about the beekeeping other than just chatting with people about their projects and techniques was working on the traditional grass hives. These are the bee hives that have been used by locals in this area for hundreds of years and are a good way for bee keepers to get started since they require no investment other than time. They are made from long grass collected from the bush and tied together with palm fronds.

The next few days were dedicated to trees, tree nurseries, tree grafting, Tree ID, etc. This was the part that I was most interested in since I have some potential project involving tree nurseries and really wanted to learn more of the techniques and concepts involved. We spend some time talking about various trees both African and Exotic imports, their identification and their uses. One of the most interesting areas we worked on in these few days was the grafting techniques. We learned and practiced several different grafting methods used on citrus versus mango trees as well as others. Grafting is simply a way to attached a bud of an already grown tree to a developing tree. The reasons for grafting are many but some of the most common include having multiple varieties on a single tree. For example you could have several species of mangoes on one tree so you have a longer flowering period. Or you could even have oranges. lemons, and grapefruit all growing on the same tree. Sounds crazy but its true. Another very common reason for grafting is to make trees grow better in a certain environment. For example you may have one type of mango tree that grows well in this region from the seed and works well with the climate but the fruit is small. So you can just grow that tree from a seed and once its about a year or so old you can graft a bud from a full grown mango tree of a different type that has large fruit and you have the best of both worlds. Like I said there are a lot of reasons to graft trees so check it out if your interested.

We covered many other aspects like composting techniques, pest management, fertilizing, etc. The whole week was really a good time and I learned a ton of new stuff that I'm ready to try out. In the near future Lydia and I plan to start a family garden in another compound near by that our host father owns and also start planting some useful trees in our compound that can be used for food for the family. Eventually we also want to get the tree nursery started at the Beekeepers when we get our staffing issues worked out.

The types of trees we plan to plant in our compound are moringa and Pidgin Pea. These are both really good trees for food. They grow very quickly and provide a lot of nutrition. The moringa tree has a million different uses and the pidgin pea can be used just about anywhere beans are used. Google them if you want more info.

We had some people from other PC countries come to the IST. Two guys from PC Senegal showed up and two volunteers from Guinea as well as two staff from Guinea came. It was really nice to get to chat with them. They were all very interesting and we made some contacts so when we travel down that way later this year we will have some people to be in touch with.

We also had a discussion on Bio-fuel. With all the controversy right now around such things it was interesting to have the discussion and guest speaker. The speaker was from a local NGO that is promoting the planting of jatropha to produce biofuel and to stop the creep of the Saharas march south into the Gambia. Jatropha is supposed to grow well here and it could be a good cash crop but I'm not sold on the idea yet. Again Google if you have an interest.

So last weeks IST was a success and a good time. This week I'm in another IST for education which is going well but the material is not quite as fun. Its good to see all the people from our training group though.

Later.

The title of this blog reflects the fact that I have absolutely nothing to write about so I'm going to just start typing and see what happens. I guess I feel I owe it to my audience however small to update since its been a few weeks at this point.

Looking back at the last entry it appears that I'm a little crazy about cashew fruit. Not much has changed on that front and the cashew season has just started so the forecast is not good if your tired of that topic. I have started making cashew wine. In true bush wine fashion the first batch was made win only the juice from the cashew fruit. I went down to the market a few weeks back and bought two piles of fruit (about 2 Kilos) for 10 Dalasi (about 40 cents) and smashed them all up with a coffee cup when I got home to get the juice out. This yields almost 2 liters of juice. I wanted to use the natural sugar and yeast in the juice so I didn't add anything. I let that ferment for a couple days which from what I was told was long enough. Well with much fan fair we broke it out on the third day and started drinking. Wasn't wine. We drank it all anyway because it was so good. Round two started about 2 weeks ago. I did the same thing pretty much, still didn't add any yeast but did add some extra sugar and this time I up a balloon over the top of the container with a pin hole in it to release the pressure. This gave it an anaerobic environment in which to ferment. It took about a day for the fermentation to get rocking but then it came on with full force. It sat in the corner of the room bubbling away for the last two weeks and Lydia and I tried one of the bottles last night. Definitely wine! Strong Wine! So I have successfully made my first bush wine. I think I will try again sometime without adding even the sugar to see how it goes. Pretty amazing that you can just squeeze the juice out of some fruit and let it sit for a few weeks and all of a sudden you have wine.

The next few weeks I will be in Peace Corps IST (in service training). Each sector within peace corps has their own IST which last a week but since I'm working in two sectors Environmental and Education I am going to two ISTs. This coming weeks Environment IST will be the most fun probably. We will be working on Beekeeping related techniques which I might be helping with some of the training on that and later in the week we will be working on tree nursery management, fruit tree grafting, and various Argo Forest skills. I'm looking forward to that part since I haven't done much work in that area and we are starting up our tree nursery at the beekeepers soon hopefully. There will be Peace Corps volunteers from all over W. Africa coming to attend the Environment IST so it will be fun to meet those people. The Education IST is the week after next and will be slightly less exciting since most of the material will probably not relate to my work. Anyway it will be nice to catch up with all the people in our group and I'm sure I will gain something out of the workshops.

I took my counterpart from the college fishing last weekend. He said he hadn't been fishing since he was a kid so he borrowed a bicycle from his friend and we road out to the river. We caught four catfish which my host family cooked up and were delicious. Im hoping to get some more interesting catches some day here but its still nice just to hang out down by the river and catch anything. Rumor has it that there are some monster fish in The Gambia river but thus far they have eluded me.

For any of those nice people out there that have sent us packages. First off, thank you. If we haven't told you we got them or we've told you specifically that we haven't gotten them you cant actually worry until its been 12 months from the time of shipping. That's the new rule. We just got three boxes of Christmas presents from Lydia's folks that were sent in November. Nothing like Christmas in April. They were shipped 6 months ago and as far as we can tell from the stamps and tags on the boxes they somehow ended up in Johannesburg, South Africa for awhile and then maybe whet back to the states for a bit until they were sent from New York to Belgium and then finally to The Gambia. We have actually heard stories of packages arriving a year or more after shipping.

Ok that's enough rambling for now. Hope everybody is enjoying the beginning of spring back in the states. We have enjoyed a few days of relative cool lately but its getting into the hot part of the year and we shall soon suffer. To quote one PC Volunteer who was trying to convey how hot it gets to a newly arrived volunteer "It gets so hot (dramatic pause) you want to f*$!ing die!" I don't know about that but just don't stray too far from a source of water.

Cashews are delicious, so is cashew fruit. After posting some pics of cashew fruit last time I made a blog entry I had a few comments about them. I guess a lot of people that live in the U.S. or other places with cooler climates than The Gambia don’t know exactly where cashew nuts come from. I was among this group but shortly after arriving in The Gambia I found the answer to this question I never thought to ask. So it turns out they grow on trees just like money! That in itself is not really that exciting but what is exciting is the fruit that grows on the same trees. This fruit is not technically a fruit from what I read but a large piece of the flower/stem. I have been trying to figure out what these aren’t sold in the U.S. but after some thought and research it seems the answer lies in their short shelf life. The fruit starts to go bad within a day of being picked and the skin is extremely delicate and can be broken by just a little jostling. Luckily for me there are trees all over the place around here and you can by the fruit on the street during the season. Personally my favorite way to enjoy it is to just eat it like an apple. The flesh is squishy and extremely juicy. There are a bunch of other uses for them including juice making, jams, and cashew wine/liquor. This last one is becoming one of my home projects so I’ll let you know how that goes a bit later. I don’t want to leave out the interesting facts about the cashew nut itself either. The nut grows in a encasing that is attached to the bottom of the fruit and hangs down underneath it when they are attached to the tree. When you want to eat the fruit you just twist of the casing and set it aside. I haven’t actually seen the casings being removed but from what I hear it goes something like this. To get the nut out of the case people cook/burn the casing until they can crack it open and take out the nut. The oil from the casing is extremely caustic a will burn the skin if it gets on you so that part has to be handled carefully. Apparently the oil is used in some industrial processes. I think cashew trees along with mango trees have to be at the top of my favorite trees list (no I don’t really have a favorite trees list). Both types of trees provide great fruit with a million uses, both are hardy and grow relatively easily, bees love both of them and make good honey from them, the mango tree is the best shade tree I have ever taken a nap under and the cashew tree’s not that bad either, what other tree provides shade, fruit, and protein all in one. (Challenge…. There must be others I await your comments). I guess that’s about all I will bore you with as far as cashews go. I’m really not as crazy as I sound, just appreciating the simple things.

I realized today that I ride the Ferrari of bicycles in The Gambia. I have a Trek. I have no idea how much is cost because I didn’t buy it, Peace Corps gave it to me. If I had this bike in the states no one would even give it a second look. It’s not a huffy but it’s also no a duel suspension, titanium, disk break, downhill bomber either. By American standards it’s a decent bike for getting around. Here in The Gambia if you own a bike at all that is something of a status symbol. You won’t ever see a shed full of old kids bikes rusting away like you would in the states. Often it’s only the father of the compound that has a bicycle. My host father has a bike which he rides everywhere and the kids are lucky to have one bike which they share between six of them often to run chores for the family. If you have a bike you ride it. If you can’t ride it anymore you sell it just like you would a car in the states because its worth a lot of money. Everywhere I go people are always saying that my bike is very nice, very strong and very fast. I of course realized that I was lucky to have such a nice bike but never really analyzed the situation. Today I was on my way home from the Beekeepers, I was riding through the forest and I flew past an old man on a standard Gambian bike. An old Chinese bike, squeaky, no gears, with a goat strapped to the back. It’s at that moment that I realized how expensive and capable this bike must look. I can cruise along at 20mph without breaking a sweat while this guy busts his butt to coax 10mph out of his bike with twice the effort and he’s still got to listen to that goat. Something like when a guy blows by you on the interstate in a new Ferrari and you wonder that he’s compensating for. Although not a perfect comparison I think it illustrates the point.

I almost forgot. Last weekend Lydia and I road our bikes down to the Kartong Festival. Kartong is a small village on the coast down on the southern border with the Casimance region of Senegal. The festival was pretty cool. At night we would walk down to the village and watch a bunch of music and dance performances. The performers came from all over west Africa. Lots of drumming, some fire dancing, and other interesting stuff. We stayed in a hut on the beach and just relaxed in the day mostly enjoying the nice weather and the strong breeze. One day we road down to the river that marks the boarder and did some exploring in that area. That's the gist of it maybe Lydia will have more to add later.

Admin note: The option to leave comments on the blog is primarily there for people to discus something about the blog or to ask a question they would like answered on the blog. These comments will be posted publicly on the blog after being moderated by me. If you want to send a message to me and only me or want to say anything that you don't want the whole world to know send me an email. I wont post my email address because I don't want to get spammed. So if you don't know my email address you have two options. Ask someone who does know it, or you can post a short comment saying that you want to email me and include your email address. I will reject the comment because I don't want to post your email address either but I can then use your address to email you directly. I'm not sure if I'm making this more confusing then it needs to be but often people leave comments that either don't pertain to the blog or contain some personal information that I don't want to post and since I often don't know the email address of the person leaving the comment I cant respond at all when I would very much like to.

That’s it for today. A bit random on the points. Sometimes I just try to come up with a few thoughts or topics and write about them. This is the result. For those of you who are bored by such things, start asking more questions about things that interest you. Until next time…

(Final note: If anyone has a picture of a goat strapped to the back of a Ferrari please email it to me.)

Well today is Friday and I'm just going to take it easy and wrap up a few things at work today so I thought I would jump on-line and ramble about a few things that are interesting to even fewer people.

First off I have to make a confession. I have been pondering over this for many months now that I have been in The Gambia and have been meaning to write about it but just haven't gotten around to it until now. As many of you know in the past kids kind of freaked me out and I didn't really know how to deal with them. They always seemed unpredictable and slightly dangerous to themselves or other things around them. Like a pack of wild dogs or something. Anyway all of this probably comes from the fact that I have never been around kids too much in the states. All that changed once I came to The Gambia. Here kids of all ages are everywhere. They dominated life more than anything else as far as I tell. I think the rule of thumb here would be where there is one kid there are at least 17 more lurking just around the corner. As you can imagine this was somewhat traumatic when I first arrived but after living in that environment constantly for almost a year now I have learned to enjoy it to a certain extent. So my confession is that I guess kids aren't as annoying as I once thought they were. Now, there are those of you in the crowd that might take this point and run with it a little too much so before you get too excited let me rein you back in. While learning to enjoy having OTHER PEOPLES kids around and playing with them I have also become even more sure that I don't want to have my own kids. My window of patience for kids is still limited and I have not once thought that having kids of my own would be a good idea. So those of you who have or are planning to have kids you can breath a little easier in knowing that they can enjoy a fun weekend of camping with uncle Andy but your still out of luck as far as kids on this end.

I have been taking some pictures at the Beekeepers this week so I could give you an idea of what we have been working on there. Some of the pics are of the new construction that has begun over the last week at our main headquarters site. Once finished we will have new and renovated office space, training area, tourist center, and processing center. There are also some pictures of the honey filter system that I have been working on. This is made from locally available materials and the aim is to make the cleaning of the harvested honey quicker and easier to do on a large scale. It basically consists of two buckets with a filter in between. The dirty honey goes in the top bucket and seeps through the filter into the bottom bucket. The design can be simply modified to make a multi stage filter by adding another bucket on top. We are going to start testing a 2 stage filter next week to see if it can speed things up a bit. Currently the impurities clog the finest filter too quickly so we need to add a larger diameter filter to the process before the honey reaches the fine filter. Its not rocket science but so far it seems like it will yield cleaner honey and make handling the large volumes of honey more efficient.

There are also some pictures of Lydia's trek for work. She most of you probably read her blog but she went up river a few weeks ago for a week of observation. The lecturers at the college go to see how the new teacher trainees in the field are doing.

In other news... there isn't really any. Were both doing good and enjoying ourselves. Were going to head south to Kartong next week and enjoy a few days of R&R. We here there is a nice quiet village there and there is supposed to be some sort of festival going on over the next weekend. That's if for now. Hope to hear from you soon.

Man its been awhile since I have updated but seems like I'm busy all the time and when I do get some free time the last thing I want to do is spend it on the computer. Today I had to come up to the college to get a few things and thought I would take advantage of the quiet of the weekend to let you all know whats going on.

This past week Lydia and I took the long trip up to Dakar, Senegal for what is known as W.A.I.S.T. The name has a double meaning for some when they add an "ed" to the end of the acronym but officially it stands for West African Invitational Softball Tournament. As the name implies this tournament brings people from all over W. Africa for a weekend of softball and fun. There were teams from Benin, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea. Peace corps definitely has the highest number of participants at the event but the teams also include native W. Africans, diplomatic personnel, military personnel, and ex-pats from various countries. People come for various reason. Some are serious about playing the game, some come for fun and to see the city and I'm pretty sure some just come for the drinks, especially those from countries like Mauritania where alcohol is outlawed. We came mostly for fun and to see the city but had a great time playing softball as well. We didn't do so well and lost every game except one that we tied but I don't think anyone on our team had played softball for at least a few years if ever so not too surprising.

We spend a lot of our timing hanging out with the other people around Club Atlantique which is where the event was hosted. Its like a slice of America on the coast of Dakar. Including a swimming pool, cheeseburgers, and volleyball. Its quite surreal actually. Most of the volunteers are hosted by various embassy personnel in the Dakar area so that they don't have to pay for a place to stay. Lydia and I were lucky to get a great host with a really nice apartment right in the center of downtown Dakar. He treated us very well and we enjoyed all the modern conveniences even if just for a few days. Dakar is pretty amazing in itself. Some call it the Paris of W. Africa. Now I don't have a frame of reference for that one but they do speak french at least which was interesting since we don't. But we managed to wing it and come up with enough french and hand gestures to get around. Sometimes we were lucky to have a friend with us that spoke French or Wolof the local language. Anyway, Dakar is located on a point that juts out into the Atlantic and the scenery along the cost is beautiful. Some areas have nice beaches and others are high cliffs with waves crashing at the base. Some of the terrain reminded me a lot of the coast of California. After living in a village for the last 9 months, seeing sky scrappers and a real city environment is pretty crazy. We spent a night walking down the street just seeing the sights and every night we had great food. The first night we ate with our host at his apartment, the next night it was Italian, then Indian, and finally Ethiopian on the last night. The food was definitely another highlight of the trip.

We didn't have any games on Monday (because we suck and didn't qualify) so we took the day to check out on of the Islands just of the coast. Its was just a short walk from where we were staying to the ferry and the island just a 30 minuet ride away. This island played a big part in the slave trade back in the day so there is a lot of related history. There is also a large amount of the original colonial buildings still intact so it has a really unique feel as you walk down the narrow streets. We spend a few hours there and then headed back to the mainland. On the way back on the boat Lydia and one of her friends decided they should shave their heads! They had been talking about it for awhile and had been carrying all the tools with them waiting for the right time and what better time then on the back of a boat in the Atlantic. Anyway check out her blog for a picture.

The trip there and back was long and hot. Getting from our house to Dakar can take about 5-6 vehicles ranging from car to bus to horse cart and at least one boat thrown in for good measure. The whole trip lasts about 10 hours one way. But it was good to see a bunch of Senegal on the way Some day I will catalog all these modes of transport and put pictures up for you but for now you will just have to imagine. Needless to say when we finally made it back to The Gambia on Tuesday we were glad to be home and subsequently passed out just after eating dinner.

Here in Gambia life goes on pretty much as usual. Work is going well and I feel like the projects are moving forward at a decent pace. We just had a new family move into our compound over the last few days so we now have another 6 or 8 people running around adding to the excitement.

I have had a chance lately to check out the much publicised One laptop per child (OLPC) laptop. The company sent several to our Peace Corps post for evaluation and they have been getting passed around between the IT volunteers. My fist impressions are good as far as reliability and cool integrated features but it definitely has some drawbacks most notably that you have to plug it in to charge it which wont work to great if you don't have electricity in your village. Solar or a hand crank is probably the best answer to that. But if they can work around such things then it could be a useful tool to introduce students to computers.

Speaking of solar power I just read an article in popular science the other day and a California company has found a way to use a technology that has been around for quite awhile apparently to manufacture very cheep, highly efficient and flexible solar panels. That sounds pretty sweet to me but now we just have to wait and see if it actually turns out to be as awesome as it sounds. Check out the article http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_59.html

In other news my friends Nick and Amanda are getting married next Friday up in Washington state. So I would like to say I love ya, good luck and we miss you guys sorry we won't be there to enjoy the day.

Check out all the new pics and read the captions for the low down. See you soon.

Looks like January is on the way out the door and with it another month of life in The Gambia flys by. Things seem to be moving along at a reasonably good pace as far as work goes. Quick update on that: At the Bee Keepers we finally just about have our contract for the rural processing centers and the improvements at our headquarters site so we should begin construction in the next month or so on that which should be exciting. We also may actually get that water/irrigation system that I was working on some time in the near future. The honey continues to flow in from various sources and we are expanding our sales to various locations around the area. I have also taken on another subproject which is trying to refine the efficiency of our honey processing and bottling procedures. Right now it takes a lot of man hours to do these things and I think with some simple improvements we can make it quite a bit more efficient. Were not talking rocket science but some simple changes might make a significant difference and free up some people to do other things. Maybe I’ll post some pictures of that stuff when I get a little further along. The college continues to forge into the information age. We have our new internet connection up and running at both campuses. We have a blazing 768Mbps connection here in Brikama and 256 in Banjul. It may sound small but relatively speaking that’s like a T3 in The Gambia. So were trying to utilize those connections to link both campuses and get some other fun stuff going. Life in general is going well although the heat continues to return slowly. Lydia and I traveled up country this past weekend to visit some friends in various places. We both left Brikama on Friday afternoon and ended up in Ferafennie on the north bank for the night. We met up with quite a few friends there and enjoyed some good food and hanging out. Saturday morning Lydia continued on solo to JanJanbury to see another one of her friend. I stayed in Ferafennie for the rest of the weekend and had a great time. It’s an interesting town right near the border with Senegal (where in the Gambia is not near the border with Senegal?). It’s a transit town for truckers and traders coming over the boarder so it has a lively feel to it and there’s always a lot of activity and the street food is delicious and abundant. My mom asked how I got to Ferafennie this weekend when I talked to her. I though some of you might be interested in the details and it might give you an idea about travel in W. Africa. When we left our house on Friday we walked to the highway and caught a Gelly-Gelly. A gelly-gelly can be any type of van or bus or truck but is generally either an old beat up mini-van with 11-12 people or a large old beat up Mercedes van/truck thing with 20-35 people. The first type generally run on more urban stretches and the second type are more common on rural/bad road stretches but these generalizations are made to be broken. So the first gelly takes us to a place called West field which is near the PC office. There we switch to another gelly which takes us to the capitol, Banjul. Once there we take a taxi from the car park to the ferry terminal. This is the main and largest ferry terminal in the Gambia and is also there port for the country. So you go in and buy your ticket to get on the boat. Once you have your ticket you run to get on the ferry before it leaves you and try not to get run over by any vehicles also trying to get on the boat. Since there is little in the way of safety regulation its pretty much every man for himself. Now we sat on the boat for about an hour and a half while we cross the river to the north bank. Once we got to the north bank we again have to fight to be the first ones off the boat ahead of the other foot passengers (I’ll explain this in a moment). So we get off the boat and run to the exit of the ferry terminal and dash through the market to the car park. There we try to find a set plas (French for “7 place”) that is almost full to take us to Ferafennie. A set plas is a (old beat up) station wagon that holds 7 people and is much more comfortable than a gelly. The reason we have to be among the first to the car park is that cars only leave when they are full so if you lollygag around and you get to the car park late then there might not be enough people going to your particular destination to fill up the car. Then you have to wait an hour or two for the next ferry to arrive and fill up the car so you can go. Anyway we found a car and it filled quickly so we were on our way. From here its pretty easy barring any major break downs. That said breakdowns are common especially blown/flat tires and broken leaf springs from the bad roads. In fact Lydia had a flat on her way back the other day but she said they guys should join NASCAR due to their speed at changing tires. We made it without any problems and dropped at the junction in Ferafennie where our friend met us. That’s how you get form here to there. All in all it took about 5 hours to go about 150k (93 miles). Not a world speed record but a lot more interesting/fun then cruising down I-10. That’s it for now. Hope your all well. Thanks to everybody who send packages for the holidays. We have received many and some are still out there somewhere. But don't worry yet there are many stories of packages arriving 5+ months after they were shipped. Give me a shout if you have any questions or just want to say what up. Later.

Hey there are about 8 more pics that I just put up now from the bee harvest. Check them out! O ye by the way. Who do I know that lives in Korea? I get all these hits on my blog from Korea and its either someone I know or just a fan of the blog. If your reading this and you know me let me know who you are so I can stop wondering. If your just a fan, thanks for reading. I'm glad you enjoy the blog.

Andy

Well its been some time since I last posted a blog it seems but I just haven’t had too much to say. This past week I had quite a few interesting things going on and now I’m just enjoying a relatively cool (85 degrees) Sunday afternoon so I thought I would punch out a few paragraphs.

Last Wednesday night we officially kicked off the honey harvesting season at the Bee Keepers Association. We had been trying to get the first harvest underway for a month now it seems but we just couldn’t get everybody coordinated and a time scheduled. We were finally able to get weekly staff meetings organized so at the last one we nailed down a time and everybody agreed. So on the day of about 8 of us arrived at the center about 6 o’clock in the evening to get preped and start working. Generally honey harvests in Africa are done at night because the bees are less active and more disoriented in the dark. This of course applies to all other bees outside of Africa too but African bees are much more aggressive than European/American bees so it’s a good idea to use all possible advantages to their fullest. The first thing that you need to do is go over your bee suit and look for any holes and seal them up. Most suits used here are made by local tailors and look pretty much like mechanic coveralls except they include an integrated hood with screen sewn in around the face so you can see but the bees can’t get in. They are made with some sort of reasonably thick fabric, like canvas, to make them a little more resistant to the bees stings but you still need to wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt underneath for added protection. Even this as you will read doesn’t guarantee anything. To seal up the holes you can either use thread and needle or go with the old PCV standby, duct tap. Once that’s all done you can start getting suited up. By this time its about dark and someone has a camp fire going to provide light and a place to congregated when the shows over. Other things you will need to complete the outfit are thick rubber boots and gloves, and a wide brimmed hat to wear under your suit so the hood doesn’t sit right on your face or neck. You also need a few tools for the actual harvest. A bucket to hold harvested honey comb, a knife to cut the comb off the hive, a "hive tool" for breaking loose pieces of the hive that have been "glued" together by the bees, smoker for calming the bees down, a soft brush to brush the bees off various things, and of course a flashlight. Now everybody is suited up and we split into two teams of 3 or 4 people each and go off and get the honey.

I went off with my group and we started on the first hive. Basically it went like this. We approached the first hive slowly and just watched for a few seconds to get an idea about how strong the hive was (how many bees). This gave us an idea about how much honey was in the hive as well as how many pissed off bees we were going to have to deal with on that particular hive. Next I went up with the smoker and blew some smoke in the hive entrance. The smoke triggers the bees "abandon hive" reflex. They think there is a fire so they try to gather up honey and get outta dodge. This theoretically means they don’t have time to bother with you as you try to steal their honey but somehow many of them still find it in themselves to take notice. After we smoked the hive for a minute or so we took the top off the hive box. Now we could see into the hive and start to take the honey out. This is also when they bees start to get mad and we started to get our first stings. I got one right on the cheek through the veil and some on the shoulders where the bee suit sits right on the skin and they sting right through the suit. These were the first of about 20+ stings I received throughout the evening. I can’t imagine anyone who is afraid of bees in general in this situation because the bees are flying everywhere and crawling all over you. The sound is impressive, the buzzing gets to a roar on a strong hive. Now that the hive is open we had to locate the honey. Not all combs have usable honey in them. Some are empty and some have brood (bee larvae), pollen, or unripe honey which is honey that has not had enough moisture removed from it yet by the bees. Usable honey is in comb that has been capped by the bees indicating that it is ripe and ready for harvest. So we took out the good honey and shook/brushed off the bees and then cut it off the wood piece called the top-bar into the bucket. We have to keep the bucket covered at all times or the bees will start to steal the honey back that we just stole from them. After we got all the honey from the hive we just look over the hive to make sure there aren’t any bee related parasites or pests in the hive or any broken pieces on the hive. Once that was done we put everything back in place and moved on to the next hive.

We had about 25 hives to do and with two groups we got it all done in about two hours. The apiary where the hives are is kind of out in the woods and its dark, you have this hood on which you really can see that well through, flashlights in The Gambia suck, and bees are stinging you and flying everywhere so all this leads to a bit of disorientation. After we got done with one hive we had to kind of reorient ourselves and even then we missed a few hives that we had to go back and do at the end. One of the hives that we missed on the first pass was one of the hives I had been watching with interest over the last few months because it looked like a really strong hive by all the bees we could see flying in and out. When we came back to it we unfortunately had run out of fuel for our smoker since it was the last hive we harvested. We went ahead anyway, people often harvest without a smoker but it sure would have been nice to have it. I got plenty of stings on that hive the bees were creating some kind of vortex around us in the air it was pretty amazing. A few people had to evacuate the area because they were getting too many stings. Anyway we got most honey out of that hive so the payoff was nice. Overall we didn’t get that much out of this harvest because the "flow" period hasn’t really started yet. This was mainly to clean out the hives and get them ready for the season but we still ended up with about three buckets of honey comb.

After all the harvesting was finished the next thing we needed to do was get the bees off of us. Some of them like to stay on you even after you have walked far away from their hive. So we walked out into the bushes on the other side of the land from all the hives and brushed off the bees with tree leaves. This also resulted in a few more stings but after 15 or 20 minuets of walking around in the bushes doing this we managed to get most of them off. We all went and got out of our bee suits by the fire and were able to enjoy some fresh honey still in the comb for our reward. That was then end of the night and we all headed home excited for the first harvest of the season.

The next day all my stings were swollen up. Including the badly placed one on my right cheek so I had to endure questions of "what happened to your face?" for the next day or so. Check out the pic for a visual. I was also sick that first day after the stings but I’m not sure if that was related or just coincidental. Anyway supposedly after the first or second stinging session your body gets used to the stings a bit and the swelling isn’t as bad. Check out the pics for more on the honey harvest. I will also post some more on Thursday hopefully if I can get them from the other guy who took some that night.

Moving right along then… Today after breakfast and a bit of chilling around the compound I decided to try once again to find the fabled path to the river that has been an object of my obsession of the last few months. Lydia had some other things to do so I packed my bag with some food, water, and my collapsible fishing rod and headed out on my own. This time I was pretty sure I could find the place. I was armed with the information from my previous two failures as well as some first hand knowledge from a guy I happened to meet and ask about it last week. On the way out the wind was wicked due to the seasonal hammitan winds and my pace slowed down quite a bit as I went along but about an hour after leaving the house I found the turn off that I was pretty confident was the place. I found out that the place I was looking for was a Melina plantation owned by some Lebanese businessmen and this was how I knew the place it was a giant forest rising out of a generally less forested area. The area is surrounded by a high concrete wall and there was this large blue gate. I looked around and didn’t really see anybody so I opened the gate and went on it. I looked around inside and didn’t see a watchmen anywhere so I thought I would head up the dirt road a bit to see who or what I could find. About 100 yards up the road I found a watchman sitting by the road and eying me suspiciously. I went up and greeted him in Mandinka and told him I wanted to go to the river. After a bit of confusion he went off and found his boss the Lebanese guy to ask him if I could go. The watchmen and the boss guy both turned out to be really cool and they said I could go there anytime. So I got back on my bike and road up through the forest for another 15 minutes or so. Just before I reached the river there was a really pretty area right on the edge of the forest with banana trees and palm trees and various crops being grown. When I reached the rivers edge I knew I was at the right place because there was the big earthen pier I was looking for. I road out to the end and went to the side where I saw some old rusty barges run aground next to the pier and saw some guys sitting around. There was also some other old boats around and one newer barge that the guys said they use to transport rice up country. Apparently the owners of the land want to make this pier and alternate port to the main port in the capitol. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I set down my bike and shuffled across a precarious metal plank running out to one of the barges and went over to chat with a guy sitting there fishing. This guy was pretty cool and lives in Brikama. He said he comes here to fish pretty often and also goes to other places around the area. So he offered me some bait and I sat down and fished for a couple of hours. The river in this area is really nice. It’s near where it empties into the Atlantic and is really wide. You can just make out the trees on the other side far off in the distance. The bank is generally inaccessible because of the mangrove swamps so it’s a wild area for the most part. I ended up catching two small fish which I left for the guy who gave me the bait. Now I have another place to go fishing. I want to try and get some shrimp in the next few weeks and head back there to see what else I can come up with. I finished up around 3:30 and started the ride home. This time I had the same strong wind at my back and the ride was quick.

That’s about it for the exciting stories of the week. We got in touch with one of the NGOs that’s working with the college and our request for funding of the internet connection went through and we should be getting that installed in the next few weeks. One more step in our project will be complete.

Check out the new pics. Don’t forget there are still some of the gruesome ones on there from Tobaski so be careful. I may take those down after another week or so unless I get a lot of objections so that people don’t have to worry about accidentally coming across them. Happy new year to everyone. Write us some emails to let us know how your doing.

Later…

This past Thursday was the Muslim celebration of Tobaski here in The Gambia. This is one of the biggest holidays of the year for Muslims around the world. Starting early last week all over the place you could see people getting ready. Many people travelled early in the week back to their home villages further up river so there was something of a mass exodus from the western region of the country to the rural up-country villages. It is said to be extremely difficult to get transport during this time to anywhere. Thankfully we didn’t need to travel and stayed at our home compound for the holiday.

For weeks leading up to Tobaski we could see the sheep population growing steadily at our local sheep/goat/cow market as well as others that we would pass from time to time on the way to the capitol. When it came down to the few days just before the holiday there were thousands of sheep all along the roadside at one of these markets. Sheep as far as you could see practically. This was the earliest and most apparent sign of what was to come. On Tobaski Muslims that can afford it are supposed to slaughter a ram (male sheep) as part of their religious proceedings. I don’t know the whole background but the short version goes something like this and if there are any Muslims out there that can give a better account please chime in with a comment. Muslims say that God told Abraham to sacrifice his son in his name. So Abraham said he would and this proved his commitment to God. Just before he was to kill his son God substituted a ram for Abrahams son in reward for Abraham’s willingness to follow his command. So that’s how the whole ram sacrifice thing came about.

So several days before Tobaski sheep started to show up in our compound. One was bought by our host family and one by another family living in our compound and we also had a goat thrown in for good measure (an acceptable alternative to a ram if you can afford one.) On Thursday the morning pretty much starts like any other just taking care of daily duties around the compound and then the men wash the sheep which is required before the slaughter. After washing the sheep everyone gets dressed in their nice clothes and go to the Mosque for morning prayers. I went along to watch the proceedings and it was pretty interesting. Thousands of people were in the streets with their prayer mats all facing to the east and the prayers were being sung over the loud speaker at the Mosque. I didn’t bring my camera because I didn’t know it that would be cool or not but I saw a bunch of other people taking pics of their families and all so maybe next year I will have something to show you about that. Anyway so after prayer all the men and children return from the mosque and get ready to slaughter the rams.

After changing out of nice clothes we all gathered around the yard and got ready. What is required to slaughter a goat you might ask? Well not much else then a sharp knife and possibly a machete for breaking up the larger bones if you so desire. I will spare you the details of the dispatching for those of you who might be in denial about how the meat you eat is produced but when the initial part was done we had two dead sheep and a dead goat ready for cleaning. The cleaning part took about 2 hours and we all participated. The whole process was pretty interesting and a lot simpler than I had expected. Fist you have to skin it and then you have to gut it and then cut up the meat and so on and so forth. Once all that was done the meat is split up into three even proportions as dictated by tradition. One third should be kept for your self and your family, one third should be given to your friends and the final third should be given to the poor or needy. Lydia and I didn’t know this part ahead of time so we ended up falling into the friend category and were surprised to have some goat and sheep to figure out how to cook but more on that later.

So after the slaughter was over all the women went off to the cooking huts to prepare a late lunch. Fist we ate the liver for appetizer and then lunch came in full force and we ate a ridiculous amount of food over the next few hours. In fact I ate so much I made my self sick and spent the next day recovering. So from Thursday through Saturday there was a lot of meat around which may seem like an odd thing to say but in The Gambia meat is a big luxury and when there is a lot of it it’s a big deal. Lydia and I decided to cook the portion we were given in the solar cooker for another experiment. Lydia made a delicious marinade out of random things she could find around and then we cooked it for about 3 hours in the sun. It turned out great. We ate what we could and gave most of it away to the other families in our compound.

I’m sure there are some more interesting things that happened but I seem to be suffering from a lack of flow on this blog entry if that wasn’t already apparent so I wont try to force it. Lydia and I are going to head up to Fajara today to hang out with some people up there tonight and tomorrow. We hear there may even be a turkey in the works for Christmas dinner or lunch. We hope all of you are having a nice holiday. We miss you and hope to hear from you soon.

**** WARNING::::: There are new pictures up but some are VERY graphic of the "Sheep proceedings" so look only if you dare or close your eyes on the disagreeable ones. ****

That’s right we used the solar cooker this weekend and by all accounts it was a success. A while back my dad sent me this recipe for cornbread for which we were able to find all of the ingredients locally in the market. This was a bit of a challenge but we came up with everything we needed after a month or so of keeping a lookout. We used sour milk where it called for buttermilk, we found what I think was just pounded corn and used that where it called for cornmeal, and the other things we found pretty much as they were called for in the recipe. We originally planned to try cooking it in dutch oven or something in the cooking shed but then we got the solar cooker.

If you read the last blog entry then you know that we recently acquired a solar cooker on loan from Peace Corps for testing. This is a very simple device consisting of two pots and a cardboard reflector. One pot is made of clear glass and the second is made of enamel coated metal and is black. The black pot is slight smaller than the glass pot and sits inside it with a tight fitting glass lid. You put what ever you want to cook into this pot and set it in the middle of the cardboard reflector and point it at the sun. The idea is that the solar reflector concentrates the sunlight on the pot. The light energy enters the glass pot and is absorbed by the black metal pot turning to heat energy. The glass pot lets the light energy through but won’t let the heat back out just like the windows on your car on a hot sunny day. This is how a fairly simple setup does something pretty sweet like make cornbread.

So after mixing up all the ingredients which was pretty simple we poured the batter into the pot and put the whole thing up on the roof of our shed in the back of the house. This involved a slightly precarious maneuver of me on a chair with a stool on top of the chair to get up high enough but I managed not to die or drop the bowl. After that it was pretty much just leave it up there and rotate it slightly every hour or so to center it on the sun. While it was cooking it was pretty amazing how much heat was being generating. I opened up the lid at one point to look inside and the batter was sizzling around the edges of the black pot and it was too hot to touch. So three hours later it was finished, cooked to a golden yellow complete with browned edges. It is delicious especially with some Gambian honey on top. The recipe made an extra large batch so we had enough to give to our host family and some other PCVs around the area and everybody was loving it. All this for about 60 Dalasi or about $3 U.S. of ingredients.

That’s it for now just thought some of you might be interested. If you want to check out the manufacture who make the solar cooker go to www.she-inc.org. Also I posted a few new pics today. Some are of the cornbread and some of other random things so make sure you read the captions for all the details. Later…

Well not really so much a chill as a pleasant break from the heat. The last few weeks have been quite nice in the evenings and the early hours. I’m not really sure what exactly the temp is but it’s surprisingly comfortable. We even need a blanket at night sometimes to stay warm. The best part of the cooler weather is seeing everybody’s reaction to it. As soon as the temp dropped just a little bit everyone started breaking out these big jackets and bennies and whatnot. It can’t possibly be cooler than 65 or 70 degrees but some Gambians are dressed for snow it seems. At night where as we usually sit out in the compound chatting and drinking Attaya (tea) everybody now is inside trying to stay warm. Lydia and I will just be sitting on the porch wondering where everyone went. I guess its all relative. When its over 100 for a good chunk of the year 65 or 70 degrees is a big change. Lydia and I took advantage of the weather last weekend to head out on some more bike explorations. We road south almost to the boarder with Senegal to visit one of our friends in a village there and stayed and chatted with them and their family for a little while. From there we headed due west through the bush on a trail that eventually took us to the main coastal road and on to the village of Gunjur on the coast. Went down to the beach where they haul in the fish on their beautiful African Mahogany boats. These boats are amazing. Some of them are very large, maybe 40 or 50 feet, and open. Men will take them out for 3 or 4 days at a time to bring in a catch. They are all painted with bright colours and look like they would last almost forever based on the construction. And remember these are all made by hand from raw materials (trees). There’s no marine lumber yard here. On the beach where the catch is offloaded there are numerous smoke houses. This is the primary method of preserving fish in the Gambia since there is little refrigeration. Whatever is not to be sold fresh is taken to these long narrow block houses dried and smoked. After we were done there we headed back on the main road to Brikam because it was getting late in the day. It was a nice long day of exploring about 30+ miles in all. I have had several people ask about language lately so I thought I would give you a run down on language in the Gambia and how it applies to us. African languages in the Gambia basically fall along ethnic lines. There are about eight or so ethnic groups in the Gambia with countable populations. Mandinka, Fula, Wollof, Jola, Sarahule, Serere, Bambara, and Aku. The first four are the ones you are most likely to meet since they are roughly 36%, 22%, 14.5%, and 11% of the population respectively. Luckily most people can speak more than one of the above and sometimes can speak a bit of English as well. It all depends on where you are in the country. If your way out in the bush up river you will find villages where they only speak Fula and no other language and if you only know Mandinka your kina screwed. But down country there are more people who speak multiple languages and usually one of them is Mandinka. Since we were to be posted to Brikama which is primarily a Mandinka area we learned Mandinka during our training period. Many people have asked how much we speak Mandinka and the answer is quite a bit. In our compound talking to our host family, in the neighbourhood, out in the market or around town, and travelling we use primarily Mandinka. Everyday we learn something else we didn’t know in the language. Obviously there are some frustrations but overall I am enjoying the process of learning a new language. And when we get back home Lydia and I will have a secret code language that we can all talk about you right in front of you and you will never know what were saying (cue the evil laugh) Mwuhahaha!! As for work, at the college pretty much everyone except for the grounds staff speak English so we only speak Mandinka there for practice if at all. At the beekeepers most of the staff speaks English pretty well but a few don’t so sometimes I use it there. The best thing about learning the language is the advantage you get when you meet people and can talk to them in their own language. Especially in the market this is usually met with great surprise, happiness, and cheaper goods. When your getting hassled but a kid its also quite effective. Typical interaction follows: Kid: Toubob, Toubob, give me minty (White person, White person, give me candy) Me: Tiilibuloo be naadii? (how is the afternoon?) Kid: Stares in confusion, has never seen a white person speak Mandinka before. So that’s the Gambian language run down. Were trying to lean the greetings for the other big languages (Fula and Wollof) so we can at least greet them in their own languages before switching to Mandinka. Like I said before greetings are a big deal in The Gambia. We recently acquired a solar cooker from one of the APCD’s (review the Peace Corps lingo blog entry) and were going to try it out this weekend hopefully. It basically consists of a black glass pot which sits in the middle of a solar reflector made from cardboard that has a reflective surface on the inside. These units are on loan from Washington for field testing so were going to try cooking various things in it and recording the cook times and recipes so they can report this info back to Washington. The idea is that since there is most often a clear sky for much of the year in this region these cookers could be used to cook in the villages and towns reducing the amount of firewood used. Currently almost all food in the country is cooked over a wood fire. Deforestation is a major problem in the Gambia and at the same time firewood is a significant expense to those in villages where they can’t cut down their own firewood and must purchase it. Although I certainly don’t envision solar cookers being the final answer to this problem they my have their uses, and it should be a fun experiment anyway. That’s it for now. Have a nice weekend.

First a few announcements: Congrats to my sister and her husband on the wedding. Hear the trip to Jamaica was sweet glad you guys had fun. Two of my good friends (who happen to be married) are going to have a baby very soon. You know who you are. Hope everything is going smoothly. Keep the blog up-to-date for those of us who get our news from it. I would just like to say that the Florida Gators kick ass and the Florida Seminoles… well the Seminoles … not so much. That’s four in a row for the Tampa/St. Pete crowd who likes to keep track of such things. I would also like to say hello to Jacque and Charlie in Kansas. Thanks for reading the blog. Your son says hello and really appreciates the new clothes from the latest package. And now the news… Last Thursday we headed for the capitol for a Thanksgiving celebration, 40th Anniversary of Peace Corps in The Gambia celebration, and an all volunteer meeting. On Thursday after a bit of work here in Brikama we headed up to the capitol area for a quick meeting, some hanging out, and then off to dinner in the evening. We spend part of the afternoon cooking and hanging out at a Peace Corps staff house and then headed over to the Ambassadors residence for the dinner. Dinner was very nice and very American by Peace Corps standards. The house is right on the ocean so it’s a good setting and we had all types of food that you would normally have on Thanksgiving, right down to the cranberry sauce still molded in the shape of a can. We even had the United States seal on our napkins. Now this may not seem like much to you but I can assure you this is a pretty amazing thing here in The Gambia. A significant number of the items we had for dinner were brought in from The States by various arriving guests or staff. So we all ate well and then went for a swim in the POOL, another amazing thing. After dinner we just headed back to where we were staying for the weekend and relaxed. Were we’re fortunate enough to stay with one of the Embassy staff members in a nice house all weekend. On Friday we all woke up early and headed down to the Kairaba Hotel which is a nice hotel near the beach. This is where the celebration was held for the 40th anniversary of the Peace Corps in The Gambia. I believe its one of their longest continuously running Peace Corps programs. Is this something to celebrate or not? There are mixed opinions on that question. But the day went well and there were a lot of speeches buy Americans and Gambians alike, then we all ate a bunch more good food to top it off. That night the one and only brewery in The Gambia held their annual Peace Corps party. Now I have heard various statistics on how much of the domestic beer supply PC volunteers drink but the most reliable and believable one I have heard is around 10%. Not a particularly surprising statistic considering most people here don’t drink and most PC volunteers are right out of college. So since our organization is such a good customer, every year the brewers throw a party for all the PC volunteers with all you can drink beer. So just about all 90 or so of us enjoyed a few free drinks and got a chance to chat with a lot of the volunteers we don’t see much. I also had a chance to chat with the German (of course he’s German!) brew master who is a pretty interesting guy. After a late night on Friday we woke up early on Saturday morning to get to our all volunteer meeting. We spent most of the morning in meetings and closed out with lunch. After that most people just went to the beach to relax and some started to head back out to their villages. Lydia and I hung out at the beach for awhile and then ate dinner and headed over to where we were staying for the weekend. Our hosts being much better off then ourselves have satellite TV and we were able to see the stomping of FSU by UF. Of course we (actually just me) did have to stay awake till almost 2am to see the end. The next morning we packed up and headed back to home sweet home Brikama. We had a good weekend but it was also quite surreal and small taste of the reverse culture shock that will no doubt take place on our return in a few years. After being here just six months we have become used to our surroundings and comfortable in our village. This weekend was a 180 shift from our normal every day lives. We hung out with Americans all weekend, drank beers, watched some movies, ate American food, stayed in American style houses ect. You would expect that to be a relaxing break but a lot of the time I was thinking that I would be more relaxed back in Brikama. It was a little like the feeling I had when I first arrived here and was trying to get used to village life but in reverse. About two weekends ago Lydia and I had an interesting bike ride. We have been on the hunt for a good place to access the river from Brikama. So normally back in the developed world we would get out a map or go ask anybody in town to get directions. They would tell us go down here take a left and such and such street go two stop signs, take a right… ect.. Well things don’t quite work like that here. Most people here as I assume is the case in most developing countries don’t travel for the sake of travel or go places just to see them. For instance my little host brother has never seen the ocean. He is probably 9 or 10 years old and has lived his whole life about 8 miles from the beach but has never been there. This is not uncommon and my host father who is probably in his 40s could not tell me how to get to the river. That being the case it’s pretty hard to ask people how to get anywhere outside a 1 or 2 Km radius unless they go to that place all the time for work or some other function. They have simply never been to that place and may not see why you would need to go to that place. When Lydia and I tell our host family that were going to try to find the river they give us a funny look and I suspect think were kina crazy. So our best bet was a look at Google earth of all things. There are some paper maps of the Gambia but they are unreliable and only show about 10% of what’s actually there. So the satellite images on Google earth are the best we can come up with. We used these to locate what kina looks like roads and then just kina guess which road that is when were actually out in the bush trying to find our way. This has led us on several trips to nowhere and this one particular weekend we still didn’t find the river but we found a mining camp. We were headed on the up country road through a couple of small villages and then we saw a track going left that we thought was the one we were looking at on the satellite map (no street signs or street names in The Gambia). It was a well traveled dirt road with a decent surface that looked like it might be the one. When we were on the road we would ask people we pass if this was the way to the river. They would either say they didn’t know or say yes (sometimes people will say yes even if they don’t know just to satisfy you, this is a common occurrence). We continued down this road for about 2 or 4 Km ended up not at the river but at this mining area. All these men were everywhere with pick-axes and metal pipes chipping rock out of cliffs. This is the same rock that I see everywhere and is used to make cement and now I know where it comes from. It was amazing how much they had mined by hand. We stopped and chatted with some of the guys as best be could because they were mostly immigrants from Guinea and they didn’t speak Mandinka or English very well. They are all camped right there in the mining area and were getting ready to quit for the day. They were quite surprised to see us as they probably don’t get too many random white folks riding through on bikes. They were just about as interested in us as we were in them. Anyway having failed again to find a way to the river we turned homeward as it was getting late and we had a long ride ahead. We will probably try again this weekend and eventually find what were looking for but the lack of directions usually leads to more interesting finds. Till later…

Not much news out of the Gambia. But I suppose that is kind of like normal life. Once you get used to a place things stop surprising you or don't seem blog worthy after awhile. That's good as far as I'm concerned because I assume that means I'm well adjusted. Maybe not so good for the people back home who want to hear interesting stories. But I'll keep trying to put out the good ones as we go along. If you have any questions that's the best way to get more bang for your buck. For now here are some random snipits

Lately work has been moving along at a good clip. I have been in the capitol all day getting some estimates for a solar water pump, panels, and tank for the Beekeepers office. We also had lunch to send off one of our college's that is ex peace corps but back working with the Beekeepers. He is headed back to the states soon.

The weather here is fluctuating quite a bit now. Some days its still killer hot and some days its not too bad. Some nights I'm still sweating but some nights are nice and cool I'm just waiting for the shift all the way to "cool". That will be nice.

Here are some interesting things that you probably didn't know about The Gambia I just noticed/found out recently.

Whenever the president flys in or out of the country the close the entire road from the airport too his house for several hours and all the ambassadors from all the nations represented in the country must go to greet him or see him off at the airport.

Sometimes you see solders on the side of the road or in trucks carrying the standard issue AK-47 or a similar weapon but sometimes they don't have any magazines (bullets).

In the Gambia you can wear sandals anywhere even to the most formal meetings (Im taking full advantage of that one)

My Gambian surname (Jurju) is traditionally a name of the ethnic group Jola, but I lived with a Mandinka family that has that surname so every time I introduce myself I have to explain why im speaking Mandinka not Jola.

I feel safer walking down any street in the Gambia at night then I do walking through some parts of Shalimar at night.

You can eat barracuda in the Gambia (and most of west Africa) and its supposed to be delicious. But you can't eat it in many other parts of the world because they feed on reef fish which contain ciguatoxin.

You are not supposed to write in the dirt, buy salt or whistle at night among other things for superstitions reasons.

You can deep fry almost anything if you put your mind to it. Hear are some of the ones you might not have tried but we have here. Cabbage, Egg Plant, Carrots, Hot Dogs, and Cucumbers.

In the entire time I've been in The Gambia I have only seen one Gambian woman smoking a cigarette.

That's enough of that.

Next week we are have our Thanksgiving meal, 40th anniversary of the PC in The Gambia celebration, and an All Volunteer meeting in the capitol. So that should be partially fun and partially a pain in the ass but hopefully mostly fun. Lydia and I got the hook up and are going to stay at the acting ambassadors house which should be pretty nice. We might even get to watch the Gator vs. FSU game on satellite TV if were luck. Go gators!