Dafa Wiis

Yes, that’s right, it is sprinkling. Or it was, for like 10 or 15 minutes! First sight of precipitation since the 21 of October! I could hardly believe the familiar noise my roof was making so I went outside and sure enough. Not really enough to cover the ground but still, I was excited.

So I haven’t written in over a week but I guess that’s because I have fallen in to a routine around here. I have never spent so much time at site and am really enjoying it. Since getting back from Ziguinchor, I have only slept 1 night outside of Bambey. The weather here is great – my winter involves high seventies to mid-eighties with slight breeze. What is yours like? :-) I missed 2 softball games but just was not feeling traveling into Dakar for one game, consecutive Saturdays. So I have been trying my best to keep busy.

Since I last wrote to you, I had quite a productive day in Ndem. First things first, I am amazing at fixing bike tires. I had 2 flats from 3 thorns since November and since my pump is broken, I brought my repaired tires to the bike-pump guy. He was very impressed with me. Anyways! I am trying very hard to find Ndem clients/partners in the US without a lot of luck. I got an email from a possible client in Wisconsin explaining the US market and used it as English practice for my partner. Even though most of what was written is bad news for us, since the economy just isn’t stable to import expensive fair trade goods, it gave my partner some good ideas. I was also in Ndem the day they were packaging a huge order of over 400 bags, 200 baby booties, and 200 tableaux being sent to Belgium. At least not all over the world has a suffering economy.

My project is going well. We need to figure out how to get more water available at our site and to get the frickin’ government of Bambey to cooperate, and then we’ll be set. They needed to do inventory so we had to give back the wheelbarrow, rake and pitchforks, and said the next day we could come back and pick them back up. Easy enough? Not. I went to the mayor’s office at 10 and handed in my “demand” for the materials. They said come back in a little bit after the president dude signs the paper to make it all official. So I went to greet some people and came back to find Djebaye sitting around waiting. We waited in the sand storm that Bambey is most days, until noon. I called the pres until I ran out of credit wondering what was taking so long. He finally showed up at 12:30 to tell me simply that I needed to go elsewhere. So I went there and waited around for over an hour, missed lunch and still only had the wheelbarrows. I scheduled a meeting on Monday for another business to lend us the rakes and pitchforks but just called to double check that and I’ll have to wait to do that until later in the week. That’s what I am here for right? Otherwise, the project is going well!

So tomorrow I am off to teach at training! It’s the new kids’ IST so I agreed to go to help out. It will be good to be back and see my Thies family and get a new dress made from my host mom there. Should be a fun week!