Watch out for the goats!

Only for obvious reasons I guess! Biking back from Ndem today, I fell off my bike and skinned my knee in the gravel. When last did I have a skinned knee? Good question. And you know how everyone has that reaction to get up and look around to see who saw? Well, randomly, I was on 1km out of the 13K road that actually had kids on their way to school. So it was if I was back in grade school, just as mortified. Maybe I proved a point… “That’s why the toubab wears that funny thing on her head! She falls!” Terrific. Don’t worry, my knee will be fine and in order to restore my dignity, I am just going to tell everyone that I was going super fast and a stampede of goats ran out in front of me and had to swerve out of the way. You believe it right?

So like I said, I went to Ndem hoping to work on the IFAT application again. We didn’t exactly get to the application this time, but I am proud of my accomplishments. I had been asking Abdou how people send in orders because there is a chalkboard with clients’ names and dates, along with a mess of random papers that have very important information on them. So I talked to him about creating an order from. All of their products are already on the computer, so for the rest of the day, he and I made an order form! I am suddenly known in Ndem as “borom informatique” – master of computers! That’s right! It took me forever but I have it all set up and organized so that clients can simply copy and paste what they would like to order, specify the color and size and email it in. Abdou is going to send it to a few clients and ask them what they think, since we are probably missing a few things, but job well done in Ndem.

I went “fishing in the desert” earlier this week with Lamine. We sold 5 cases of fish to 23 villages including 34 women. I have recommended a different way for him to keep track of who owes him money in his accounting book. I have a feeling what he tells me his profits are, isn’t exactly accurate. I hope he understood me, but if not I can always go back out. This time, we didn’t get stuck in the sand and only had a slight scare with the missing breaks! I was asked to spend the day, and sometimes night by just about everyone, so I have to come up with a plan to avoid all the nice invitations next time. I took a few pictures, so check those out!

Ron Tchetter, the PC director came to visit us. I got the chances to talk to him, which was very cool. He told us stories about how he was a community health volunteer in India in the 60s with his wife and how since being the director, has traveled to over 40 countries and that he reports directly to the president, who “gets very excited about all this stuff”. (George? Excited?) This visit, he saw Guinea, Senegal and was on his way to the Gambia. 3 other volunteers and I met with him to talk about our work with artisans. The Africa regional director was also at the meeting and will get us in contact with other countries that are already exporting successfully. Hopefully we will get in touch with the people that export to Hallmark and Ten Thousand Villages!

I finally have met one of the three principals at the middle schools. And I’ll be meeting the rest as I will with my women’s groups soon enough. But early next week, I’ve got plans to play tourist in the mangroves! Life is good in Senegal. Watch out for the goats!