- Plucked chickens out of a tree (do that almost every night now for my mom since we have 2 that like to chill in a tree in our courtyard, while the rest are dutiful and go to the chicken coop each night)
- Biked to Ndiba (a town about 20 km away from Kayemor from the main road), went to the weekly market there (called a "lumma"), and swam in the Bao Bolon River (pronounced very similar to “Babylon”) with 2 other PCVs
- Shelled more peanuts (thank goodness for athletic tape – my fingers would be raw if I hadn’t had it!) and also dropped them in the air from one big plastic bin to another to separate out the shells from the actual nuts
- Cooked millet at 6am with my mom
- Played soccer with boys (mostly 10-15 year olds), and run around the field with older guys (while the younger boys just messed around with the ball)
- Actually made tea (I learned how to in TawaFall, but couldn’t quite get the technique down of pouring the tea from cup to cup to cool it down and get a foam on top, but now I can!) [Side note: my nickname among my family and a few other people like Yassa is “Xiim” which is the verb “to make tea” because the people in TawaFall would sometimes use that for when they were actually making tea, so I said it one of my first days in Kayemor and they all got a kick out of it because no one in Kayemor really uses that word…oh nicknames. :) Gotta love ‘em.]
- Went to Kayemor’s daily vegetable market, bought the vegetables for lunch, and then peeled and cut them as they should be (according to Senegalese cooking techniques) – all by myself! (I’ve done all that before, but with my mom, never by myself.)
- Learned how to open, fill (that’s easy!), and tie (quite challenging at first, but once I got it down, I got in quite a bit of a rhythm) the little plastic bags my mom (and the other kids in my compound) fill every day with bisaap juice to freeze and make “radi” (that my aunt then sells the next day, mostly to kids, for 25 cfa, which is about 5-10 cents)
- Made a garden in the fenced in area in my compound where my mom grows corn, cassava, and millet during the rainy season, has a couple papaya trees, and has a vegetable garden during the dry/cold season
- Locked myself in my hut and worked on my computer a few mornings, mainly to read past documents the PCV before me in Kayemor had emailed to me and to write up stuff for my blog (like this!)
- Had bisaap harvesting training with the girls in my girls group, and harvested a little of the bisaap flowers (and cut my fingers in a few places while doing so because my knife was so sharp and I am so used to dull knives)
- Started reading “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson; still have yet to finish “Huckleberry Finn” (the first book I started here) but decided a wanted a little more intellectual stimulation one day, so pulled that book off my shelf [I am probably the only PCV in Senegal right now that has not read an entire book yet during our service so far…as much as I love reading, I just think that sitting and chatting as best I can with my family and friends is better for me right now in terms of community integration, learning Wolof, getting to know my family, etc. etc. – and I still have plenty of time to read all the books I want to]
- Biked to Ndiba (a town about 20 km away from Kayemor from the main road), went to the weekly market there (called a "lumma"), and swam in the Bao Bolon River (pronounced very similar to “Babylon”) with 2 other PCVs
- Shelled more peanuts (thank goodness for athletic tape – my fingers would be raw if I hadn’t had it!) and also dropped them in the air from one big plastic bin to another to separate out the shells from the actual nuts
- Cooked millet at 6am with my mom
- Cooked peanuts in the evening with my mom and other women
- Played soccer with boys (mostly 10-15 year olds), and run around the field with older guys (while the younger boys just messed around with the ball)
- Actually made tea (I learned how to in TawaFall, but couldn’t quite get the technique down of pouring the tea from cup to cup to cool it down and get a foam on top, but now I can!) [Side note: my nickname among my family and a few other people like Yassa is “Xiim” which is the verb “to make tea” because the people in TawaFall would sometimes use that for when they were actually making tea, so I said it one of my first days in Kayemor and they all got a kick out of it because no one in Kayemor really uses that word…oh nicknames. :) Gotta love ‘em.]
- Went to Kayemor’s daily vegetable market, bought the vegetables for lunch, and then peeled and cut them as they should be (according to Senegalese cooking techniques) – all by myself! (I’ve done all that before, but with my mom, never by myself.)
- Learned how to open, fill (that’s easy!), and tie (quite challenging at first, but once I got it down, I got in quite a bit of a rhythm) the little plastic bags my mom (and the other kids in my compound) fill every day with bisaap juice to freeze and make “radi” (that my aunt then sells the next day, mostly to kids, for 25 cfa, which is about 5-10 cents)
- Made a garden in the fenced in area in my compound where my mom grows corn, cassava, and millet during the rainy season, has a couple papaya trees, and has a vegetable garden during the dry/cold season
- Locked myself in my hut and worked on my computer a few mornings, mainly to read past documents the PCV before me in Kayemor had emailed to me and to write up stuff for my blog (like this!)
- Had bisaap harvesting training with the girls in my girls group, and harvested a little of the bisaap flowers (and cut my fingers in a few places while doing so because my knife was so sharp and I am so used to dull knives)
- Started reading “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson; still have yet to finish “Huckleberry Finn” (the first book I started here) but decided a wanted a little more intellectual stimulation one day, so pulled that book off my shelf [I am probably the only PCV in Senegal right now that has not read an entire book yet during our service so far…as much as I love reading, I just think that sitting and chatting as best I can with my family and friends is better for me right now in terms of community integration, learning Wolof, getting to know my family, etc. etc. – and I still have plenty of time to read all the books I want to]
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