The Holidays

So Thanksgiving and Christmas and the new year are all rolling by without much written here about it, so... oh, and also I have what is becoming an absurdly big post about my bike trip, whice people probably dont really care about that much, so itll go up backdated later.

Well, thanksgiving for us was pushed back by several weeks. I spent the actual day of thanksgiving in the village, not doing really anything that resembled holiday stuff, but it was a good time to use as an excuse to relax a bit.

The saturday after was Tabaski, the grand holiday which here involves great sheep slaughtering. Last year I broke out my new camera and took a ton of pictures of the day. This year, I chilled with the old men who were mostly playing cards. I purposely missed the slaughtering and ended up missing about all the butchering too. By the time lunch came around I realized I had taken basically no pictures but wasnt really in the mood to start then. It was like a very chill time of eating that wasnt as great as I remembered from last year, but nice enough. That night there was a big soiree at this fenced in area set up next to the school. They had a generator and huge speakers that blasted music until nearly sunrise for two days. This year that all happened about a hundred meters from my hut, it was not a great time for good sleep.

The other unfortunate part of the holiday was the meat. Even after the first night, eating it for lunch and again for dinner, was something my stomache did not appreciate. I wasnt sick at least but it felt mostly like something was slowly twisting my digestive organs into pretzels. Then we had the meat again for lunch and dinner on sunday. Then more on monday. And more tuesday. Wednesday I was so happy to see it absent, joyous that it hadnt killed me. And then we had more meat on Thursday and I thought i was going to throw up just from the smell. I came out ok in the end. But still, keep in mind I am in a village. We have no electricity, no refrigeration, no ice. The meat is just left out in chunks on a concrete shelf or on the floor in a small metal roofed cooking hut that the air for the most part has been replaced with flies. I try to avoid going near that building after holidays.

Anyway, so then, after my big ole bike trip, I got back to site on the 23rd. Most of my holiday plans were made pretty last minute. I hosted two voluteers that day, they were coming from Tamba and were headed to Saly, just north of Mbour, to spend Xmas with a small group there. Also that day, an American young woman named Ruth came to the village. She is working with the large garden in my village that is owned by a guy from Dakar. Surprisingly she is staying in Louly for about a month, living in my house even, with my family.

Anyway, so then I went to the beach with a different group for Christmas. We got a house up in Popenguine and had an amazing time. There were maybe more than a dozen of us for the actual day of Christmas, some were there earlier than others, some, including me, left later than most. We grilled food on the beach, later made an amazing roast and other food that was all fantastic. We even did white elephant- I got a platic gun which i promptly broke trying to get it working and an inflatable Santa with a squeeking foot which I gave as a present to the people of Popinguine who would surely appreciate the off-season holiday spirit more than the people of Louly...

A day or two after Christmas was tamxarit, a holiday here marking the Islamic new year. Last year I was in the village to see it but this time I missed it, though there is not really too much to see till nighttime anyway and these days I like to sleep after sunset. Yeah, I know, I have gotten really lame.

Then after a couple days in the village again I went up to Dakar for New Years. Though I didnt really do much but sit at the regional house, which in fact is the same thing I did last year. But there was a lot of people out in the city and we say and heard a huge amount of fireworks and noisemakers the whole night and into the next day.

Anyway, now I have been in the village a lot, trying to get just about everything done at once and for once actually accomplishing some of it. I will write up a good post later on the latrine progress. It is progressing!

Developments in Progress!