Day 59: Tour of Nder

After a night where I didn’t get too much sleep, I woke up to the call from the mosque. During Ramadan, the person (I don’t know who) gets on the loud speaker at about 5am and starts yelling and telling people to wake up to eat before the sunrises. I’ve been experiencing this 5am wake up for pretty much the entirety of Ramadan, because they do the same calling/chanting thing in Yoff.

Anyway, Eric and I woke up, had some breakfast, and went to meet the others for our morning meeting. We then departed on our tour of the village. However, by the time we actually got going, it was about 10, and about an hour in to the tour, it started getting really hot. Oumar Diene, the director of our NGO Cresp, was leading the tour. Oumar has the tendency to talk for long periods of time because he is so knowledgeable, something that doesn’t really cater to 20 other people who are standing in the heat listening.

Let me explain a bit about the weather: The Lac Du Guiers is one of the first permanent water sources south of the Sahara. Basically, what that mean is, that Nder is very close to the desert. During the day, it gets up to about 100+ degrees, but it’s not very humid (like it is in Yoff.) By about 5pm, it starts to cool off relatively quickly, and by the time it gets dark, the weather is perfectly comfortable. However, most of our activities go on during the day, in the heat.

So, we’re on our tour, and it starts to get hot. We saw most of the village, including the school, the planting fields, and met some elders. After finishing the tour, we had another meeting, trying to organize for the afternoon. By that point, we were all sitting in the shade. Because it’s so hot, that’s really all you can do here in the middle of the day.

After the meeting, we continued to lounge around, and I played chess with Anthony, a French student coming along with us just for the Nder trip. He was pretty much a chess genius, but I managed to beat him once (out of 5 times I think.)

We ate lunch (Ceebu Jen, again) and lay around until 4, when we had a meeting at the chiefs house. The purpose of this meeting was to tell the village elders exactly why we are here, and to explain to them the concept and phases of Appreciative Inquiry (the same thing we had done in Medina Kouta on the first village trip.) After greetings, welcome-ings, thanks, etc, we split up into our 5 groups (education, agriculture, nutrition, ecotourism, and women’s roles in development) and discussed what we would be doing the following few days.

After quite a long meeting (2.5 hours,) we returned to our compounds to rest before breaking the fast. Even though we aren’t fasting, our family makes us break the fast with them. I then took a bucket bath, the result of which (for the first time) I felt really clean. Taking a bucket bath is really an art, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it. By Thanksgiving, the end of our second stay here, I’m going to be a pro.

Dinner was Ceebu Jen. Again. 3 for 3. Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow.