Pictures

I finally have an Internet connection good enough to upload images, I took these pictures with my new camera over the last few weeks. The people in my village, with one exception, love to have their pictures taken. For some reason a lot of people prefer to look serious in photos, this is unusual because they're always smiling when they're not in front of a camera. These pictures are in no particular order.For some reason all of the pictures are horizontal even though I flipped them in the proper position before uploading them. I try to fix this in the future, but in the mean time you'll have to deal with sideways pictures, sorry.

Corn is the main crop in my village

The roof of my hut from the inside

Isatu

Kadija

Buba holding a machete and a coconut

Habi, my host mother, and little Habi, who hates having her picture taken 

Girls braiding their hair

My host brother Bubakar in front of my hut

Samba

Inside my hut. The silver thing is my water filter. On the wall I have a world map and a map of Paris.

Husay with a gourd bowl

Sajo running our community's grain grinder

I forget this kid's name

Lama

Usman, He looks so sad in this picture but was smiling and laughing immediately before and after it was taken

My host father, the village chief Mamadu Djallo and little Habi who still won't look at the camera. 

Usman, Lama and Buba

This kid stopped me on my way to my hut and asked me to take his picture. For some reason he decided to pose with a broken gourd bowl around his waist .

A compound seen from the road. 

Our school, it has two classrooms, the teachers live in the nearby huts during the school year.

A mural on the wall of the school

This road runs through the middle of my village. 

The nearest health post 

Our mosque

These guys aren't from my village. They spotted my camera and asked me to take their picture.

My "bathroom"

The view from my front yard

Old men on Korite. 

My bike in my backyard, the plants on the right are hibiscus

Ladies on Korite, the women in the center is my counterpart Lamarana.

Happy Ramadan!

     It's Ramadan now and my entire village eats and drinks nothing between sunrise and sunset. The vibe is noticeably different, by the mid afternoon everyone is exhausted and just rests until sunset. I've been using this time to listen to the Olympics on my short wave radio. As I said earlier, I wasn't planning on fasting and stocked up on food to sustain me during the day. Unfortunately what I thought was a 2 week food supply lasted about three days, I spent most of my time in village eating nothing during the day. Fasting actually isn't as difficult as I thought it would be, still, I plan on hitting the market before I go back to my site this evening.

     A few weeks ago I attended a wedding in my village. Like the baptism, I didn't see anything resembling a ceremony, I wasn't even sure who the bride and groom were. I went to the wedding with the chief of my village. When we arrived at the compound I began to head over to one corner where there were musicians playing and a lively crowd, the chief stopped me and invited me to sit with him and a group on the opposite end of the compound. I spent the evening practicing my Pular with old men while they argued about local politics and chewed kola nuts. When the food bowl came I was excited, an animal is typically slaughtered at these events and I hadn't eaten meat in weeks. When the cover was removed from the bowl I recoiled when I saw a sheep's head, skin and hair intact, sitting on top of the rice. I ate rice from the bowl, trying not to look at the head, when one of the men peeled the skin off and began distributing bits of tongue, brain and eyeball around the bowl. At this point I said I was full.