Story collage, Month 1

I'm not a huge photo buff, but each week here, I seem to collect a few random photos of moments that have stories attached to them. Here are a few snapshots from the past month in Kombo. (Kombo is the generic name for the urban region we live in; it's kind of like saying "the Bay Area.")

Once our house feels "finished," I'll post a lot more house photos, inside and out. In the meantime, though, here's a "view from the roof" shot to give you a sense of why I love the roof. Our latest endeavor, spearheaded by Doug, is to build a simply canopy for the roof so we can sit in the shade. Roof party, anyone? 

 

Last week, Rose and I went to Kairaba Avenue (think El Camino Real) to take cloth to our tailor to get clothes made. On our way there, we discovered that the road was teeming with schoolchildren in uniforms of every color, waving flags and occasionally breaking into cheer. Police officers had cleared the streets of traffic, and we waited for awhile in the shade to see if we'd get to see the motorcade that everyone was waiting for. But after a half hour or so, we lost interest, and went to ask our tailor what was going on. She told us that the president of Senegal was coming to town.

I've been curious about a large sunken area (we've nicknamed it The Canyon and The Dump) not far from our house, so I went to investigate. It is indeed a small canyon-ish place with hills and vallies that has become a de facto dump (though there is also an official dump in a different area of town). I ran into a group of wild pigs rooting around in the trash; one even posed nicely for this picture. I was also surprised and horrified to discover that people live in The Dump, too. You can't see their houses too well in this photo, but they live in buildings made of mud bricks with corrugated tin roofs. Their laundry is strung up on lines above the trash, and they even have little gardens growing. Oddly enough, their houses look bigger and better equipped than our huts in the village, though I'm still sad about the fact that they live surrounded by so much trash. And let's not talk about how I felt when I saw a little kid rummaging through a big trash heap. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised; the villagers in Sanchin Daxaar were only too eager to make use of our trash, which made us feel guilty and a bit creeped out. It's weird to throw away a soda can (sorry, people, there's no recycling here), and then to walk out of your hut the next morning and see a little kid drinking out of it. (Yes, that actually happened.) We compromised by saving up all of our "useful" trash (water bottles, juice cans, cereal boxes, milk powder container, etc.), and giving it to our host family at the end of our stay, since we just couldn't get comfortable with the idea of actually watching people use our trash while we were still living there.

It feels a bit strange to follow the "people living in a trash heap" photo with a photo of our car; perhaps, were I more awake right now, I'd spend some more time pondering the extremities and inequities that characterize life here. In any case, here's Doug in our spiffy car. I'm having fun learning to drive a stick shift, and Rose and Doug are both excellent teachers. Yesterday, Doug spent EIGHT hours running around town to get the necessary stickers and permits we need to actually drive it around town. Before that, we'd been stopped several times for having overly-tinted windows and for not having the appropriate police stickers on our windshield. But now our car is bestickered and tint-free, so we should be good to go!

Rose, aka Travel Chef, is a maven of creativity in the kitchen. Here, she demonstrates her ability to turn leek roots into body hair.

In addition to cracking me up in the kitchen, Rose has also been teaching me to cook some awesome dishes. This is a picture of us last night, when she cooked Spring Pasta (aka pasta with a yummy, light vegetable sauce instead of red sauce). It was damn good, people! She has also introduced us to the many pleasures of fresh feta cheese, which they sell at several local grocery stores. It tastes so much better fresh than it does in those little crumbly bits back home!

Just like in the village, there are chickens wandering around all over the urban area, including on our street. Today, the neighborhood chicken and her chicks strolled into our compound while our workers were painting. Before I chased them out, I managed to snap a few photos. Paul, one of our workers, seemed amused, and commented on the fact that I was photographing the chickens. I explained that unless you're on a farm in the US, you generally don't find chickens wandering around in your front yard!

This afternoon, we hung out at the Bakau Fish Market with a fun Peace Corps Volunteer named Lindsay. Each afternoon, long fishing boats pull up close to shore and dozens of teenage boys with plastic rectangular buckets go splashing out into the waves to collect the fish. You can see people rushing out to meet a boat in the first photo, and a boy in a red shirt balancing a bucket of fish on his head in the center of the second photo. Behind him is a slightly younger tag-a-long boy who is about to jump up and steal a fish out of the older boy's bucket. We kept musing aloud about how surprising it was that there wasn't someone out there beating the little boys that were jumping up to steal the fish. Occasionally, the boy carrying the bucket would swing out an arm or a leg to try to smack the thief, but overall, the thieves managed to sneak away unscathed, since their targets had to focus all of their attention on not dropping their loads.

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