Joyeuses Paques and start of spring to all! Above is a picture of le campement near le fleuve Gambie, which we biked to to watch les hippos et les oiseaux (the hippos are great to watch, they pop up from the river and wiggle their ears and then plop back in). I am finally putting up some photos of the area, but I don’t have any that really capture the amazing birds here yet. We’ll be working on that. I’ve been watching tons of them on my morning hikes up to the hills across from the medical complex (I try to leave around 7 and spend an hour or two hiking around on the small trails- everyone thinks I’m crazy of course, but it’s the best/only time of day to do anything that remotely involves physical activity). It’s so nice to get up and get right into nature, especially with the iridescent blue birds, black and white cartoon-like toucans, and other assorted aqua, red, black, and yellow birds that accompany each walk. They are truly spectacular (no binoculars necessary).
The first time we hiked up the hill across from us was with Laye (our surgeon friend), the guard from Le Kinkeliba, and a french humanitarian pharmatician, Christine, who we’ve gotten to know here. 
In this photo you can see Laye with his stick (to “kill serpents”) in one hand and his cell phone (to “find reception”) in the other. Fortunately and unfortunately, he got to do neither, as there were no snakes and no network anywhere to be found. They did kill a small snake near our hut yesterday (they have to be careful with the babies around), and I took this telling picture of the men in my life- let’s just say they’re not serpent-killers. Meanwhile a worker grabbed a big stick and did his thing. RIP, snake.
Mike and I have been helping with various projects here. He’s been observing and helping with a lot of patient consultations (see Laye with petite patient), and I’ve been painting a lot. A French artist showed up with a bunch of materials last week and said he was going to be making murals, so I decided to join him. He brought a bunch of designs of old African fabrics, and we used those as a base from which to make small paintings many of the huts. 
The process was fun, and involved mixing something toxic that looked like plaster with a bunch of pigments and latex and working really quickly with each color before it dried. Michel (the artist) kept yelling at me,“allez vite!” Now that he’s left to go back to Paris, I’m working on finishing up with a few more small paintings, but they’ve gotten too complicated (I don’t have anyone yelling at me to hurry up anymore!). 
Other than consultations and paintings, we’ve been helping a little bit with Christine’s project on village nutrition. Right now she’s weighing babies, measuring children, and assessing the needs of the villagers in the area in terms of nutrition. The babies are usually scared out of their minds of toubabs (foreigners), as many have never seen non-Senegalese people before. It’s pretty funny. Mike says that a lot of babies from white families cry in the states when they see him or any black person for the first time, so it’s pretty funny now for him; it’s happening in reverse for the toubabs, most of whom are white. You can see the fear in the kids’ eyes in this photo!(left)
We’ve also been teaching English and a bit of yoga, though I hope to get a regular English class scheduled for the village nearby (so many people here want to learn English, but they don’t have anyone to practice with and the English that they learn in school is pretty awful).
Yesterday we went to a village’s schoolteacher and his student. Afterward we had attaya, the strong Senegalese tea I talked about earlier, and talked about his impressions of the western media, the US, and all sorts of things. It was interesting to hear what he had to say about the stereotypes he sees about Africa in movies, how untrue he thinks most of the depictions of life are (For instance that everyone is always starving and sick). He was asking us what we thought of America’s politics and culture. Like always (like any American traveling abroad during this administration has experienced), we were put in the place of explaining our views on the president and war. He was happy to hear what we had to say, and unlike some people we’ve encountered (mainly European) was very willing to separate the people from their government and it’s actions. It’s interesting also how everyone here seems to know the expression “time is money,” and suppose that Americans are too busy for stopping to talk to someone (Our greeting is “hi” instead of the Senegalese “Hello, How are you, How is your family, Are you doing okay?”-all of which are mandatory before moving on to anything else). We tried to paint a more realistic picture of life in the US, as people here tend to think that everyone there is extremely rich and that going there automatically means having everything, etc. As for the research, Mike is also working with some friends to translate the questionnaires we brought with us from French into Pulaar, a local language here (one of about 6). Yesterday evening we went to an Easter vigil (which took 3 hours just to start, and then another 2 in service!), which was in French, Wolof, and Pulaar! I almost fell over in the bench at one point, because I was hot and exhausted and the French was sometimes hard to follow, all of which added up to me falling asleep.
What else…we’ve got some amazing stars here away from the city lights, and I know mike won’t let me off the hook without telling my “full moon” story. A bunch of us were gathered outside our hut chatting, when I noticed how beautiful the moon looked. “It’s almost a full moon,” I said. For some reason Mike proceeded to explain the various meanings of full moon in English; the one in the sky but also what it means to moon someone. Everyone thought that was pretty funny, and afterward a neighbor brought over some peanuts to snack on. Well, when I got up to hand the peanuts to Christine I lost my sarong entirely- it was the slowest falling off ever, but I couldn’t stop it from going cause I had the peanuts in one hand and didn’t want to drop them all over the ground. Fortunately, I was able to keep the front of the sarong on with my other hand. Unfortunately, I happened to be about to get in the shower and was wearing the sarong like a bathrobe. “Now that’s a full moon,” I said to a speechless bunch of doctors and nurses and such (not like they don’t see it every day) and ran into my room laughing. Of course, everyone kept commenting on how it was a full moon the next night, etc, etc. What are you gonna do?
I’ll leave you with a picture of the sunset on my favorite hilltop.
