Our Trio's Down To Two

Jen and Peter sorting out the cheese

Last week my closest neighbors and I got together for a little goodbye pizza party in Peter's village. His community counterpart Pap bakes village bread and he agreed to let us use his mud-brick oven for the afternoon. We had to make our own sauce, and use Laughing Cow cheese instead of the real thing, but it was still hands-down the best pizza I've had in a long time. We even made herb and garlic flat bread as an appetizer.

 Since the three of us live within a 10 kilometer radius of each other we've collaborated on a lot of work projects over the past year, working at the master farm, painting murals and planting trees (not to mention cooking some gourmet hut cuisine). Sadly our trio is about to become a duo, as Jen's two years is coming to a close. She is COSing (close of service) this month and Peace Corps has decided not to place another volunteer in her village. Peter and I will both still spend a lot of time over there since we work closely with Abdoul Salaam, the master farmer in her village, but it will be different when there isn't another volunteer to drop in on.

Everyone knows the best pizza comes from a
wood-fired oven

    It's been strange saying goodbye to everyone in the 2009 Ag/AgFo/SED stage as they depart Senegal for bigger and better things. Although a few of them have signed on for third-year extensions, the majority of the stage will be gone by the end of September. I've seen several groups of volunteers come and go, but these are people that have been around for my entire service, and it feels strange to watch them leave without me. Our Health/Environmental Ed stage is now the "senior stage" in country, the "older and wiser" volunteers who are supposed to have all the answers and bestow all of their wisdom on the younger generations, and the next in line to COS. In 8 months our services will be winding down too, and we'll be the ones planning COS trips, saying our goodbyes and passing on all of our old clothes and half-used cooking spices to a new generation of "leaders."

The Finished Products

   I expect these next 8 months to go flying by. It's hard to believe I've already been in Senegal for 18 months. I could have given birth to two babies in that amount of time (and no doubt my village is wondering why I haven't)! There are a lot of things I still want to do before I leave, and a lot of them involve a bit of travel and maybe another vacation, but I've also got a few work projects that I've been keeping on the back-burner that I would like to see finished. It's going to be a busy year, and before I know it it will be time to start thinking about heading home! I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little jealous of the volunteers leaving this month...I envy them their big backpacking trips, welcome home parties, access to supermarkets and ability to drive motorized vehicles again. But I know my turn will come soon enough, and so I'm also grateful for the time I have left to travel around Senegal, play with my little siblings, joke with my friends in village and maybe even do a bit of work now and again.

Our work "pocket" and Pap