Wow… So I guess blogging is not really my thing. Here are a few highlights from these last few months…
Christmas: I thought it’d be interesting to do Christmas in my village. Well, funny thing is though, one Christian family in a village of 3,000 doesn’t really make for a great Christmas. Oh well. I wanted one to remember! I went to the Church a Protestant NGO built in my village for the 7am mass. I sat there for two hours to find out that the minister couldn’t come so the Christian family’s 18 year old son did our 20 minute, all Bambara mass for us. Then I biked to the market and got some salad and cooked macaroni (6lbs) and super acidic tomato sauce for my host family. Pretty funny and embarrassing as they all watched my prepare something I barely know how to cook in a quantity I’ve NEVER made. All in all it was alright but I think I’ve checked that off my list and don’t need to do another xmas en brousse. It’s just not that fun in a Muslim village.
Lately I’ve been going to a lot of trainings. Mid January I took two women from Kouna to a shea training in Bamako where we learned all about shea, cooperative, associations and how to make shea. It was pretty interesting. When we got back to village we made soap and are now trying to sell it and see if this could be a profitable business for them… We need to go real slowly though or else I see this not taking off…. Here’s for hoping it works!
Then I was invited to a 10 day Malaria formation in Senegal at their training center in Thies. This was great! We learned all about Malaria, the epidemiology and what organizations are doing about it. April 25 is World Malaria Day so come April I’ll have more malarious updates! But basically, we’re going for no more malaria by 2015. Pretty ambitious but okay… I’m down to try ;)
Last week was the Segou music festival. We saw Salif Keita and Habib Koite and many others. Really fun festival! I went with my friend to her site for a night then down to Bamako for a tree nursery training. So many trainings! But this one was really interesting… we learned about planting and caring for tree nurseries, and grafting… so many trees! I love trees. Especially in the Sahel. To site again this afternoon!
