Day 41

So about the job; It`s pretty awesome. I teach 3 English classes a week, 1 Beginner English class for the kids and 2 more advanced classes for the highschool kids. I also have a couple of one-on-one sessions throughout the week. I’m also responsible for some of the communications, which means I’m working on the website at daarademalika.com which needs an overhaul of sorts, and we’re also going to explore the possibility of a newsletter. The best part of my job, however, is putting together activities for the kids. This can range from simple drawing contests to wrestling tournaments or even a day trip to the beach or somewhere else. I’m not doing this work by myself either, there’s another volunteer here and we work together to make it a better experience for everyone. But that’s enough about the work.

We went to the Casamance region for a week. It is beautiful there and there is fresh fruit everywhere. During our trip, I fell in love with a fruit called Mango. I don’t know if it’s just the Mangos from Senegal, but they are absolutely delicious and I’ve had one every day since.

During our trip we visited a village outside of the city of Ziguinchor. This is that village:

We also visited the city of Oussouye, and we participated in a day of all-terrain biking as well as kayaking. It was good times. It is hard to describe the villages that we biked through. I’d be surprised if more than 20% of the villagers moved out of the village at some point in their lives, but then again I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. We weren’t the first white people to ever bike through their village, so the kids knew enough French to as us for some cadeaux, at which point I told them I didn’t know French. That I told them that in French probably didn’t matter.

And now, some gratuitous photos of some of the kids and the Daara:

The kid on the left in the first photo, we’ll call him Paté for fun, is the same kid as the kid that’s front and center in the second. Why or how he has developed such a finely tuned ability to consistently pull off gang-related hand signs is beyond me, but maybe by the end of the summer I’ll have taught him the most gangster hand sign of all: the thumbs up.

Just as a quick side note: I called that Boston would beat Vancouver in the Stanley cup finals last September, back in the preseason. I think I deserve a little respect and recognition for that. Thanks.

Here's a pic of us when we went to the beach at Ngor.