WAIST

The softball tournament was GREAT! I had so much fun seeing the other volunteers from Senegal, meeting new volunteers from other countries, eating good food, and catching up with some IWU folks.

Leslie and Ryan came up from the Gambia and Jess is now a volunteer in the Tamba region of Senegal, so we all had an IWU reunion and went out to lunch. It was so great to see them!

Team Fuuta lost all of our games, but we were in the social league so it wasn’t that big of a deal. At least, not to me. We all dressed up, danced on the field, cheered until we were hoarse. FUN. I was the catcher for most games and improved my horrible throw.

Then after, I went to Dakar where I met up with the matron from my village, Wuri Ka, for a three-day seminar about HIV/AIDS. We went over Life Skills lessons, which are self-esteem, peer pressure, and sexual education lessons. It was great to be able to share with someone from my community the type of work that I do when I travel. I was starting to get worried that people just thought that I went on vacation all the time.

In other news, I am going to try and organize my village to get a pump for one of the wells. This will help SO MUCH when the water tower is out of service, which seems to be happening more and more frequently. When that happens, the women in the village have to go to one of the two wells and pull water in small, rubber bags. The wells are 55 meters deep, so it takes about 3 minutes for them to pull up one bag of water. This is hard work and very time-consuming. So, the pump will do that part of the work and then the women will only have to walk with water on their head for a long distance.

Also, another volunteer and me are trying to organize a triathlon of sorts. So far we have the run set at 20 km and then we are still debating if we want to swim across the river to Mauritania and the biking….it will happen and we are going to try to make it a fundraiser for an AIDS organization in Richard Toll. I will be sure to keep you all posted.