But what is there to DO in a village?

Things are going well in Sambande, or as we say in Seereer, a naaya (it is walking). Sorry for the long delay between posts, I've been in and out of Kaolack a couple of times to run errands but I haven't had the time to sit down and blog. Overall village life is pretty uneventful. The kids are out of school for the rainy season, and they're spending their summer "vacation" working in the fields. Since my environmental education work is rather dependent on the school calendar I've got quite a bit of free time on my hands. I mostly spend my days shelling peanuts, working in my garden, planting trees or napping under the big shade tree with my friend Bassirou. That's not to say I never do anything exciting...why just the other day we had a village wide food fight to celebrate the rainy season and ensure a successful harvest. The women cooked an obscene amount of millet and then the men ate it and everyone threw the leftovers at each other until we were all covered in a food with the consistency of wet sand. Quite a party! Here are a few more things that pass for fun in my village and some pictures to go with them:

One day my brothers spent an hour hunting mice in one of the other huts in our compound. Most people would consider bludgeoning a rodent to death with a blunt instrument entertainment enough, but my brothers went the extra mile and decapitated them as well. This is Samba, proudly displaying his two "trophies." I didn't ask what he did with the heads...


Perhaps my favorite thing to do in the village is to climb the mango tree outside of our compound with my brothers. They use one of the lowest branches as a "horse" and take turns bouncing each other up and down on it. I prefer to sit all the way at the top and watch the people coming and going on the bush paths.

Every couple of days the women go out to the forest to collect wood for their cooking fires, and one day they brought back a monkey. I have no idea where they found it or how they caught it, but our village now has a permanent primate display at one of the compounds near the well. They tied a string around its waist and keep it tethered to a tree, but it doesn't seem too interested in escaping. I think it enjoys the diet of peanuts and rice and ants.

Some days my brothers put out some millet and wait behind a tree with a big bucket to catch birds. Issa caught this little guy and pulled out all of his flight feathers before I could rescue it so I spent a couple of hours building it a cage out of bamboo. Unfortunately he managed to wiggle out the top while I was taking a bucket bath and escaped from my hut, and I'm guessing he ended up in the belly of one of our cats.

And of course, there's always the sunsets....natures television!