Blogs from Tambacounda Region, Senegal, Africa - page 2

Yes, its a little messy, and yes that is a cow eating a tree, and geese and chickens drinking out of the clothes hamper, and yes goats run rampent throughout the night, but its home sweet home...... read more

Now that we are starting a garden, with seeds from everyone- THANK YOU!! we now have to pull water on a daily basis. This is our primary well, that is if the rope isn't broken, if so we have to trek across the road to get some from the neighbors.... read more

We experienced our first full on sandstorm yesterday. We were at the internet cafe around 4:00 in the afternoon, and were fully imersed in trying to get our one photo of the week up on the web. After an hour of yelling at the computer, miscommunicating with the owner, and the intense heat of the tin-roofed-cyber, we looked outside and noticed that it was completely black. We quickly shut down our computers, and rushed outside on our bikes. About a half a block away we were pummeled by sand, and were forced off our bikes, and couldnt even tell if we were headed in any direction. All of the sudden we saw a hand come out the swirling sand, and it was the cyber owner who pulled us back into his store. We then spent ... read more

November 29, 2005 We’re finally making some progress on our work. We’ve got some dates finalized for going into villages to ask women about their health care needs. It should be really interesting, and hopefully we can gather enough information to write a half decent report. It’s really frustrating here because we’re always at the mercy of someone else to get something done. We need the supervisors to organize our meetings, because they have the links to the women, we need the interpreters to work on translating our questions, and we need the drivers to take us to the villages. None of these people work at the pace that we’re used to, so Marian and I are having a real lesson in patience. I think we’re getting better at handling the pace of life here, and ... read more

November 23, 2005 Yesterday we traveled from Dakar to Tambacounda. We were warned to leave early because it can be a long journey, so we were up at 6 and ready to go. We had to wait for Saida, our busy-body landlady, so we could pay her our electricity bill. She came by just after 6:30, and told us that our bill was 48,000CFA, which is almost $100. For TWO weeks. We were under the impression that it was 60CFA per kilowatt hour, so we thought we were doing okay, but found out it was really 150CFA per kilowatt hour. Whoops. Well, we were mad. We couldn’t believe how much it cost, we were just happy that we were leaving early, because we wouldn’t have been able to afford another month and a half! So, grumpy ... read more