Where Will the Children Play?

It’s a wild scene here at the PC-Senegal Linguere regional headquarters!  We’re nutty with excitement over a new project we have in the works.

First, a brief history: not long before I arrived in country, the previous generation of Linguere volunteers worked with local counterparts to develop  a basketball program at the high school here in town.   They raised funds to build a regulation-sized court on the campus and put together a monthly training camp that coached students in basketball skills and trained local educators to run the program autonomously.  It was a hit, to say the least.  I was lucky enough to install in my village just in time to participate in the culminating tournament, which showcased the phenomenal skill progression of students and trainers alike.  It was a beautiful event, pitting 42 confident and happy high schoolers - 21 girls and 21 boys  - against one another in a tournament that exemplified everything from focused athletic ability to a genuine fervor for organized sport.

Inspired by the synergy we witnessed that day – and knowing that it provided only minimal insight into the world of possibilities for harnessing the athletic abilities and enthusiasm of these kids – my peers and I have put together a plan for building on this work.  Our project – the Linguere Youth Basketball Initiative – aims to build basketball courts in three Linguere satellite villages: Ngaraff (home to yours truly and all the smiling faces that have colored the photos on this blog), Barkedji (home to Ann Marie Albright) and Diaglie (home to Kim Hall).  The courts will be a foundation for a larger mission in the region – one of building leadership and teamwork skills in confident, driven youth across the region.  We plan to do this through a careful progression of skill acquisition at a young age and gradual, well-directed fostering of these skills as the students grow and progress through grade-levels. 

The potential for this work truly makes my little heart go all a-flutter.   I can only imagine the manic joy, the eagerness, the zeal that will spill from the kids of Ngaraff when they have an actual athletic facility on which to unleash their yearning for anything that involves running around, playing, and challenging their peers. (And I have no doubt that this will be duplicated in Barkedji and Diaglie).  While the looks on their faces would be enough, the possibilities extend so far beyond this.  We’ll hold trainings in the individual villages and coordinate camps and tournaments across the region.  And not just in basketball, but in volleyball, handball, and other fitness-related activities.  In addition, the paved terrain will provide a meeting space for the villages, and add aesthetic appeal and morale in places that are in need of such a boost – an outcome not to be understated. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these courts will open up opportunities for a whole range of gender development activities - an undertaking that is near and dear to my sensibilities. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that the reason I’m previewing this project here – instead of giving details on completed activities – is that we’re currently engaged in a full-gale fundraising effort that involves YOU!   We have established a secured a Peace Corps Partnership “grant” (the same as the one that I launched in association with my health clinic project), so it calls on our friends and family in the states to find the funding.
 

Until it gets chipped away at, the total price tag on the website below might seem intimidating, but we're receiving support from a number of external donors.  Our PC-Senegal Country Director and an NBA-affiliated organization in Dakar has obtained a guarantee from the NBA that they will contribute a significant amount of the overall cost.  But we still need lots of help from our friends, family, and personal connections back home!

Any amount that you could contribute would be appreciated beyond what I’m able to express here. To make a donation or learn more about the project, please check out the PCPP site here:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=685-182 

Ride or Die

Everything is illuminated.  At least, much of Senegal has been illuminated. With "Bike or Die" as our motto, myself and three friends embarked on an epic journey through this country's innards.  Destination?  Kedougou.  Distance? 600 kilometers.  Path? Through the bush.  Guidance? Pulaar nomads.

6 A.M. Day One.  Setting out from Barkedji

Last Sunday, bikes in tow, Justin, Ann Marie, Mary and I set out from Ann Marie's village, 35 km outside of Linguere. It took us six days to bike down to Kedougou.  Most nights, we slept in the bush, more exposed than I've ever felt.  When I camp in the States, I generally bring a tent along; we had only a tarp, and one incomplete mosquito net for the four us.  The situation was somewhat perilous -- the first morning, for example, as Ann Marie sat up and stretched, I looked at the tarp where she had just been lying and spotted a large, live scorpion.  How she had avoided getting stung is a total mystery.  The next night, we saw aggressive lightning rolling in from a distance, so we clamored around trying to make our important possessions water proof and then huddled together, the four us, sandwiched together between two layers of tarp.  We cooked makeshift meals of pasta and other bizarre ingredients we found in tiny bush villages.  We navigated by looking at the sun -- we tried to make our way in a generally Southerly direction, following donkey cart paths through the country and stopping at tiny Pulaar encampments to ask directions to the next known destination.

The best part was traveling through all of Senegal's micro-climates.  Every kilometer we seemed to watch the terrain change before our eyes, become greener and more densely packed with trees. We started out in the desert, the very day a sand storm rolled through and covered us in unforgiving, corrosive dust clouds.  By the second day, we were already dodging sludgy puddles.  Day three, I no longer had to dodge low-hanging branches because the vegetation switched f rom unforgiving thorny trees to pliant bushes with soft leaves!  Day four, we found a verdant paradise.  Day five, we were in Senegal's Niokolo-Koba National Park, playing with baboons and listening to warthog calls.  From there on out, our scenery could only be described as jungle.  Glorious jungle. A welcome sight to flora-deprived eyes.  

On the road--

We went from this . . . 

. . . to this . . .

 . . . to this . . .

 . . . to this . . .

 . . . and finally, straight into Kedougou. 

Some fun things along the way: 

A confused baby in the bush.
Maybe we're the first white people he's ever seen?

Nomadic Pulaar community on the go.
Truly transient people still  baffle and amaze me.

Rad reverse mohawk on a kiddie in the bush.

This well is sooooooo deeeeepp.  I think they said 80 meters?
The donkey that hauled up the buckets  had to walk out ridiculously far from the well.

The scorpion that was lodged under Ann Marie's body
when she woke up on the first morning.

Huge hollow baobab filled with bats!

Newborn baby donkey!

Koumpentoum = Out of the bush!
And about halfway to Kedougou. 

Headed out of Tambacounda: 228 km to Kedougou

Park Ranger's adorable baby wearing daddy's hat
at the entrance to the Niokolo-Koba park.

That's nothin'.

We woke up to a pack of monkey's hangin' out over our
mosquito net in the Park on the last morning.

Warthogs at our campsite in the park.

The jerks stole our oatmeal!

It's all over now, Baby Blue.

We made it to Kedougou in time to celebrate with about 90 of our fellow volunteers at the annual 4th of July celebration.  We also floated along the rivers down there and hiked out to picturesque waterfalls.  Today? Back in the desert.  And happy to be here! 

Halfway There (But Where's "There"?)

My year in country mark was back in March, but I felt like the more significant milestone was the anniversary of my installation in Ngaraff, which came and went on May 18^th, while I was, ironically, out of village, traveling from Dakar to Linguere after returning from Morocco. It has triggered a fair amount of reflection on what I’ve done and am doing; what living my life here, rather than elsewhere, actually means, and all those other inevitable deliberations that accompany little landmarks that we cling to in the generally chaotic and illogical elasticity of time’s passage.  Needless to say, I reached no grand conclusions  I do, however, have some sporadic reflections.

My counterpart and her family, including one-week-old Kine. 
These are definitely my closest friends in the village.

I’ve been looking around at the babies of Ngaraff:  There are the ones walking around who were merely blob-like when I arrived.  There are the ones who for a long while were in the odd stage (reached around the first birthday) where they were scared of me, and now scream my name and reach for my hand and let me port them all over the village without protest.  There are the ones who had no problem with me in their infancy and now are entering that very phase.  And then, of course, there are the babies who – most narcissistically, I realize –  I like to say are part of “Club Bigue.”  -- That is, the ones who were born during my time in Ngaraff.  I love counting them, loudly and proudly, with all the moms, showing off how I can recount not only the order of their births, but their respective dates.  My life here allows me to follow along with growing kids in a way I was never able to in my previous life and, as you can see, I love it.  The cycle of birth (and death as well, for that matter) is simply so much more present here.

Another thing: as I’ve watched the seasons come and go here, watched it go from hot to rainy to hot to cool and, yup, back to hot, I’ve become exceptionally appreciative of the work that goes into food,  of the incessant battle to feed every mouth in this village.  I think about one of my favorite meals,  for example: millet couscous with a sauce of peanut paste, dried fish, tomatoes, beans.  (I realize…. Not that exciting.  But reasonably nutritious and… seriously, try to the millet couscous before you knock it! Although, if I lost you at “dried fish,” you’re actually right about that -- it’s a ubiquitous offense in Senegalese cooking).  For this meal to hit the enormous communal metal dinner bowl and get hastily fisted into my gullet, so many labor-intensive processes have to occur that it really boggles my mind.  The millet alone has to be planted, weeded, maintained; harvested; extracted from its stalk; bagged; transported from field to home; pounded, sifted, pounded, sifted, steamed, sifted, reconstituted into couscous.  Having been a part of each of these steps – all done by human-power, alone, without the help of machines – I can attest to the time and effort it all requires.  Then there’s the sauce: the farming of the peanuts, and the many steps to turning it into paste; the cultivation and collection of the beans, the importation of the fragile little tomatoes; the (unfortunate) importation of the dried fish; you get the picture, and I’m rambling.  I’m just perpetually astounded by the burden faced daily by the women of my village and every other village in Senegal and most of Africa: that of preparing three meals a day for a horde of hungry bellies – not just the cooking (over an open fire, might I add), but the perennial struggle of ensuring the presense of adequate supplies and maintaining them in a usable form.  I certainly have no intention of inciting some sort of guilt complex in you, but I can’t help but say this: next time you order a pizza, or put a Lean Cuisine in the microwave, or grab a ready-made rotisserie chicken from Safeway, I ask you to take a moment and smile at your good fortune: one more meal attended to, and easily, at that.  I’m living amongst people who will never once find such a trouble-free, effortless solution to the nightly question, “What’s for dinner?”

Wow.  That was a bit of a lengthy piece, I’m sorry!  I’m gonna try to be less verbose from now on…

My year mark also got me thinking of all the things I’ve done and seen in the last year that I’d never done or seen before, so I jotted down this incomplete list:

• Dismembered and disemboweled a variety of dead animals in preparation for eating, including chickens and goats
• Plucked a thorn the size of my pinkie out of my foot and the foot of others
• Sent kids on absolutely any errand I can dream up
• Ridden on a car with goats beneath my feet and chickens tied by my head
• Eaten around a giant bowl with upwards of 18 other people sticking their hands in.
• Been openly gawked and laughed at on the street.
• And so much more...

Health Hut Grand Opening!

So, perhaps you’re tired of hearing about Ngaraff’s Health Hut, but this is big news: I helped my community put on a huge Grand Re-Opening of the clinic.  I wrote a VAST (Volunteer Activities  Support and Training) grant and everything, so that we could go crazy-all-out!  I also insisted that it double as an HIV/AIDS educational extravaganza, complete with HIV testers from the Linguere hospital, AIDS-related theatrical sketches, and several health talks from local experts.  

Preparation, needless was to say, was a bit hectic – a torrent of visits to officials, conversations with community members, phone calls, and double/triple checks on little details, like ice and coolers and transportation for extra chairs.  The villagers rallied behind me and pitched in – the women showed up the day before to sweep and sift the sand in the lovely new health compound and clean out of the buildings, then stayed up late preparing beignet dough, only to rise early and drop ‘em in the hot oil by the barrel-full.  The men raised the tent with little prodding from me, and sent their precious horse carts to retrieve extra seating from the nearby town.  Despite the stressful and somewhat chaotic preparations, the event itself transpired almost flawlessly.  It was a total success, as far as the goals of the day were concerned: people had fun, ate their fill in beignets, got real, hard-hitting education on HIV/AIDS, and got pumped up about the future of Ngaraff’s health system.  On my end, I had to put up with some obnoxious behind-the-scenes BS, such as people seeing my white skin and trying to suck every dime out of our budget (what else is new?) and having to offer apology after apology as I failed to follow the correct protocol of calling the village chief and then the Imam to the microphone before handing it over the first speaker (granted, something I know and should have adhered to, but my mind was a million places that day.)  

So be it, though-- I can swallow the personal frustrations in the wake of a really successful, entertaining, educational celebration.  Still today, five days later, my people were telling me what a good time they had, how nice the party was, how “everyone was happy,” “everyone ate lots of beignets,”etc.  If they’re happy, I’m happy.  Truly. 

And the best part? 54 people got tested.  That might not sound like much, but considering that the last time a testing team came through, we had to pull teeth to get six people to show up, this was a huge victory.  I had begged and pleaded, dragged women out of their seats, cajoled them and had others do the same, and despite their fear, my lovely ladies of Ngaraff (and a few men) stepped up to the plate and entered the testing room.  My heart still fills to think about it and share this with you.

This is still just the beginning – or maybe we could see it as another halfway mark? – to a functional health system in the village.  But that’s something, right?  

Cleaning the health hut in preparation for the big event!

This is what sifting sand looks like -
and the compounds look beautiful when we're done!

Late-night beignet dough prep.

Kicking off the Grand Opening!!

The New Health Hut at it's finest!  HIV testing - lots of it!
Alhumdahlilaay!

Dance troup from the nearby town - the crowd loved it!

AIDS-education skits.  And really well done!

 Senegal Vacay 2011

My other big accomplishment for this first year of service?  Luring my dear friends Andrew and Erin out of the comfy Seattle lifestyle and into the grips of a full-fledged Senegalese adventure! They get the prize for being the first (And maybe the only?) “home” friends to visit me here.  We had such a good time!  I don’t think I can adequately express how amazingly flexible, forgiving, resilient, and easy-going they were, and it was thanks to this that we had such a stupendous, unforgettable trip.  We kicked it on the coast for a few days, kayaking in the mangroves and taking pirogue trips out to bird-covered islands to camp.  Fellow PCV hosted us at his SITE, Palmarin, which - yes - is located on a salt intrusion filled with mangroves forests.  (Not that I'm jealous...)  Erin and Andrew then bravely endured a typically horrendous day of travel to make it out to Ngaraff, where they happened to catch one of the biggest parties the village has ever seen – the baptism of my counterpart’s daughter-in-law’s baby. We brought the house down when the three of us hit the dance floor together, along with my PCV Linguere buddy Mack. 

After a gastro-intestinitis-induced layover at the Linguere regional house, we cruised to St. Louis to experience the big International Jazz Festival, held annually.  We finished up the trip at my friend’s Chris’ house, taking advantage of his highly-operative kitchen to let Andrew and Erin work their magic and create the World’s Best Veggie Lasagna.  As a side dish? BROCCOLI.  I speak the truth.  I hadn’t seen it in 15 months, and I shed tears.  Thank you, dear friends.

I heart baobabs.



Andrew helps some kids across the salt flats to get to the beach.



Erin, makin' castles in the sand...

With our Palmarin host, Chris, on the pirogue out to "Bird Island" for a night of camping.

E & A kayaking through the mangroves.

Beautiful beautiful baobabs.

With my counterpart Marieme at her daughter-in-law's HUGE baptism party.

Andrew mugs with a local tot.

Awa Cham and my favorite twins, Awa and Ada.

The World's Worst Sept-Place ride: this position is no joke!
We had to bend over like this to fit in the car.

St. Louis.

 

More pictures to the right. ==>

The Enduring Magic of the Moonbounce, Caught on Tape

Long story short: My pal Chris' friend back in Florida has a clothing company that's trying a promotional campaign that involves people putting on t-shirts with the company logo on it and taping themselves doing "Conscious Acts of Kindness." Chris decided that he wanted to find poor kids and pay for them to jump in them moonbounce at Dakar's (one and only) park -- He brought me along because he knew I would love the kids and because he doesn't speak Wolof (he speaks Serere.) Anyway, we did it and it was really successful, of course - how could you go wrong with a moonbounce?!? We took a ton of footage and Chris put together this video:

Vacation!

Okay, here's my confession: I've been out of Senegal for the past three weeks or so, prancing about in Morocco, mostly, with a brief sojourn in Barcelona as well.  What can one say?  It was all so delightful.  Morocco is truly the land that dreams are made of, a perfect intermingling between the wild sensory phenomena of Africa and the functionality and ease of Europe and the "West."  It certainly didn't feel like Africa, to say the least.  I hardly know where to start.

Traveling in Morocco with April, who's COS-ing (Completion Of Service, used as a verb, noun, and adjective inPeace Corps worldwide), Kim, and Amanda was a treat from start to finish.  We hit several of the bigger cities: Casablanca, Fes, and Chefchaouen, before flying out of Tangier to reach Barcelona.  After five days in Spain, the ladies continued on to France and elsewhere in Europe, while I returned to Morocco to meet up with other friends.

Leaving Senegal was a trip in itself!  Our minds were boggled  by the variety, the cleanliness, the giganticness of  the First World.  Take this huge lollipop I came across during our layover in the Lisbon airport, for example:

Then, as we stumbled jet-laggedly through the market of Casablanca, we were floored, over and over again by the abundance of fresh things, like delicious oysters-on-the-halfshell that Amanda couldn't help but take immediate advantage of:

Really, it was all too much-- we'd made it about four feet into the market before our wrists were laden down with way more fresh fruit and vegetables than we could possibly eat.  And olives, cured lemons, spices, hot sauce.... oh my!  

Casablanca is home to the world's second largest mosque, a 689-ft.-tall monster that can accomodate 105,000 worshippers and could easily fit Rome's St. Peter's Basilica inside it, complete with a glass floor set right over the ocean. 

A fish seller in the Casablanca market

Mosques aside, what was the best part of Casa?  Hearty fresh orange juice, squeezed right before you eyes, everywhere you turned.  Better yet, it turns out that this is the case everywhere in Morocco, and we certainly indulged.

After a few days of eating our way through Casablanca, we hopped a train for Fes, a large city known for its enormous walled-in Old Medina, now a winding maze of homes and shops selling everything from Argan Oil to Fes-made leather purses to nine different varieties of dates.  We spent a good deal of time wandering around that Medina, buying things, gaping at the medieval architecture, and benefiting from the total sensory overload that characterized the entire huge old city.  It's hard to describe the degree to which this "sensory overload" part is true.  Everything - the shoe displays, the nut displays, the archways and doorways and walkways - was not only gorgeous, but an aesthetically-intriguing site. vision. Aromas, most of them good, seemed literally to enshroud you at every turn.  And I wanted to eat everything in site - spicy olives, fluffy Berber crepe, veggie-pita sandwiches, marinated chicken shiskkebabs, and of course lots of fresh juice.

Beautiful displays at the Fes' Old Medina

My favorite olive man

Me, Kim, Amanda, and April, posing in the median of a
beautiful, wide, tree-lined street in Fes
(we don't have these things in Senegal):

Fes street food - yummy snails in coriander broth! 

Oh!  The other really fun thing we did in Fes was go to a traditional bathhouse ("Hammam").  I don't even know where to start with describing this experience.  We bought our tickets from a sketchy man at a sketchy ticket window in a sketchy alley, and he gave us soap, a scrubby mitt, and a weird brown blob of something wrapped in newsprint.  Then we filed into the locker room area, where we were instructed by a large gruff Moroccan women (using hand signals) to undress.... which we did, to our great amusement.  Then, wearing just panties and our towels, we walked around the corner into the bathing room.  We had absolutely no idea what to do.  The room was filled with beefy Moroccan women grooming each other; when we finally decided to drop our towels, we didn't know what to do with ourselves, so, for some reason, the four of us stood in a row, facing the wall -- Utter hilarity.  Finally some women who, bless their hearts, spoke moderate French, came over and told us to sit on our mats and wash our hair until our "women" showed up.  We did this, and after not too long the real fun started: our scrubbers (we'd paid extra for the full scrub down instead of just the do-it-yourself hot bath) came along and took control.  One-by-one, we were rubbed and scrubbed and man-handled by, again, huge beefy Moroccan ladies who, due to their total lack of English/french skills and our total lack of Arabic, could only access every inch of our bodies by tugging and pushing us around to get the right angle.  Perhaps too funny to be adequately described?

Jamal, our saint of a Couchsurfer host in Fes.

Next: On to Chefchaouen, which turned out to be this beautiful mountain hamlet, a cascade of stone buildings laid into the slope-side.  Interestingly, at some point in the past, the people of Chefchaouen decided to paint their walls blue – the reasons for this is are still under debate among town tour guides, but the fact of the matter is that it makes for one of the prettiest sites one has ever seen, whether seen from within a baby blue alleyway or viewed from above, as a mosaic of different shades of blue covering the mountainside.

Spices!  Gorgeous in their essence.

Chefchaouen is situated in the Rif mountain range, so we did a day of hiking that was a bit of a fantastic fiasco.  It started raining midway through the hike, though we were already soaked - at least from the knees down - because we had to cross the river upwards of 30 times and got tired of taking off our socks and shoes and rolling up our pants. After hitting the waterfall and starting our way back, we were wet and freezing, but also hungry, so we stopped in the rain to have the picnic lunch we'd planned - delicious veggie pitas with goat cheese.  Unfortunately, we hadn't planned well on the equipment side of things, and had just one pocket knife and no other utensils... so while I cut onions, tomatoes, and carrots, Kim ripped bell peppers with her hands and Amanda and April used their fists to shove goat cheese, avocado, and cilantro into the pita pockets.  Still tasted good, though I'm not sure I tasted much as I chowed down in the downpour.

One of many river crossings.

Pita pocket picnic in the rain

 We left Morocco via the northern city of Tangier on a cold, rainy day, and arrived in Barcelona that night.  Hitting Europe was even more of a shock to the senses than Morocco was after Senegal.  Everything was BIG and clean and easily accessible.  Also, expensive.  But my first delicious draft beer – real, hoppy, true beer, from a TAP – was worth every cent.  

It’s no Morocco, but Barcelona was a beautiful city with all the things I love about Europe – gorgeous old buildings, facades with intricate iron lattice work, trees, statues – plus a stunning waterfront covered in sailboats, making me itch to hop aboard one and cruise out of town.  Highlights from our time in Barcelona include:

• Walking around alone, exploring the streets and the HUGE market that offered up an abundance of everything and anything, to a point of overwhelmed dizziness for a girl coming out of Africa
• Tapas
• Renting a bike and scoping out a good swath of the city
• The brilliant and beautiful Sagrada Familia, a church designed by Gaudi according to the Golden Ratio and nature’s inspiration, which has been under construction for over 100 years and still is not complete
• Gaudi’s Park Guell, an improbable, whimsical, Dr. Suess-like collection of stone and marble formations holding exotic gardens
• The view of Barcelona from the top of Park Guell
• Nestling into an Italian bar to watch an FC Barcelona – Real Madrid soccer match
• Staring at all the sailboats and dreaming of sailing days of the past and future
• An all-you-can-eat salad+ buffet, ala Souplantation
• And so much more. 

Fish market in Barcelona

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a sailor's life for me...

My lovely travel companions.

Inside the Sagrada Familia

The Sagrada Familia. 
(Read about it! A fascinating tale to which I just can't do justice here.)

Park Guell

At the top of Barcelona.

Gaudi had quite the imagination!

It was a trip to be in Europe, even for a few days.  Maybe this is what people call “culture shock,” though I didn’t really find it to be alarming or debilitating in any way.  I just found myself carrying a constant awareness of all the little and big differences between Spain and Senegal, or even between Morocco and Senegal.  

Great as Barcelona was, I have to admit that I missed Morocco, a place that is replete with ease and functionality  but is still pleasantly rough around the edges.  I was excited to go back there.  I parted ways with April,  Amanda, Kim, and Camille at two in the morning after a night of tapas and wine; they were headed North to France and I was headed back to Morocco the following day to meet up with Mary, Brian, and Kourtney for a trek in the moutntains and various other diversions.  

Biding my time at a sweet little terraced acafe in Tangier, 
I met a fellow Los Angelino - a phD student and photographer.

Men doing their sunset prayer in unison by a mosque in Marrakech.

Morocco round II, with a different crowd and different activities, was distinct from my first visit but equally intriguing.  The High Atlas mountains are a remarkable land form.  We hiked around for several days;on the last day, we climbed up Mt. Toubkal, 4,126 meters high.  Our guide Abdou was fantastic, and we brought along mules to carry our stuff, plus a mule guide who doubled as a cook and made incredible Moroccan feast three times a day.  Some of the more wonderful six days of my life.

Thanks for carrying my stuff up the mountain, Mules!

An old man cruising through the mountains.

Brian's going home to America! I'll miss him.

A Berber village in the mountainside.

Team Linguere does Mt. Toubkal.

Heading for the mountain.

Hanging out at the top of Mt. Toubkal, North Africa's big peak.

Kourtney, Mary, myself, and Brian,
with a couple other hikers we picked up along the way.

After our trek, Kourtney, Mary and I headed for the coast, to a popular tourist town called Essaouira.  We spent just a couple days there, sunbathing and soaking up the last drops of Moroccan goodness.

The best part about Morocco: the lovely doors.
(Pictured here with lovely Kourtney :)

Chwarma in the sand - what more could you want?
I'm clearly pleased.

One last sunset in Morocco.

 Returning to Senegal was a wild experience in itself, but one that may have to be saved for a future blog post or, better yet, a one-on-one conversation.


To ease the transition, Kourtney, my stalwart travel partner, and I took advantage of our nine-hour layover in Lisbon to cruise around the city, and take in many of its many of its alimentary delights:

A wine stop at the top of Lisbon's Sheraton hotel,
with some of the best views of the stunning city,
set along the river and dappled with those
endlessly gorgeous historical buildings.  

You know that feeling you have when trying to recount something very meaningful to you, and despite all your most earnest, pain-staking, and lengthy efforts at honest description, you just don't really feel like you've done the whole thing justice?  Well, that's where I'm at now, but so be it.  I have to get back to the village and you have to move on with your life, too!

Ergo, I shall leave it at that.  :)

(Though, if you really need more - yeah right - there's an album with a lot more photos on the right. ==>)