a Friday night

The internet is a crazy thing. It's almost like running, where you have to build up your endurance or suffer fatigue and diminishing returns. It used to be that I could sit in front of a computer, bang out code and surf for four or five hours straight if I needed to. Now, my tolerance seems to be an hour. I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that it's painfully slow here, and how much of it is due to my fading computer skills. In any case, I'm pretty well spent less than an hour and a quarter into this evolution, and haven't gotten it all done.

Life since Basse has been a flurry of events and motion. I saw an amazing sun rise as I walked to get a vehicle out of Basse - it's remote enough that one has to get to the garage before dawn to guarantee getting to Soma that same day. They call them garages, or car parks, but what it really reminds me of is an anarchist's circus. Chaos is inadequate when describing the process of trying to make transport work in this country, and I only wish I had the energy to go on a proper rant. But I haven't, so I will leave it be.

One thing worth mentioning is that yesterday was the Muslim New Year. No school, and a cool recitation ceremony early in the morning with chanting in Arabic and a very communal feel. It was the first time I felt "I'm a normal Peace Corps Volunteer, trying to blend in or something", and a great experience under the "cultural" umbrella.

Another thing worth mentioning: A Korean woman has moved into our compound. She is volunteering at the high school for two months, working in the computer lab and trying to learn about The Gambia. She was at university in the UK with the husband of a woman who used to live in the compound, and he talked her into coming down here to check it out. Her English is pretty strong but she didn't even know the names of the local languages before she arrived. She's a trooper though, and has been doing very well adapting and taking care of herself. It's fun to have another gai-jin around (to borrow a word from another trip out of my comfort zone), and we're headed to Soma tomorrow for a little adventure.

Next week I'm headed to Kombo and then to Dakar for a softball tournament and some sightseeing. I will be doing the latter while some of my colleagues handle the former, if all goes well, and it should be a great time.

The second term is flying by, especially with surprise holidays and special events sprinkled liberally throughout. Soon it will be hot again and I will be typing with one hand as the other tries to funnel the sweat away from the keyboard.

That's it for now.

Christmas

So, last time I posted, I mentioned that I had put up this post about Christmas. But, apparently it didn't happen. So, delayed but still worth putting up (in my mind at least):
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Jesus was an only son as he walked up Calvary Hill...
It's the start of a Bruce Springsteen song that came on a cd Toby sent me while I was in training. I was listening to it a couple weeks ago, really hearing the words for the first time and focussing on the story as a story again after so many many years of "knowing" it, without hearing. I was weeping, amazed by the power and depth of the tale of a prophet that started a religion and the path to much of today's society. Today I have been reading New York Times Week in Review sections, catching up on the news from home now over a month old. One of the stories that I gladly missed was about the "War on Christmas" as made famous by Fox News and their group of marketers of entertainment that they would try to disguise as news. I would weep again now at the comparison of the story of a great prophet and the celebration of his birth to the crap and commercialization that some elements of our society would have it become, but it isn't worth my tears or energy. Christmas for me this year was something infinitely bigger, more important, than the shopping season and the advertising.
  I was flooded with more love than the Peace Corps mail truck could handle. I got eight big - BIG - packages, two padded envelopes, and a half a dozen or more pieces of flat mail. I haven't tallied up all the postage (out of embarassment as much as anything) but it easily reaches four or five hundred dollars. If I had known about all this ahead of time, I probably would have been much more reticent in asking for things. Certainly Clif Bars have been addressed as a need beyond my reckoning - three whole boxes of bars, plus a few dozen other assorted bars, enough to eat one every day and not worry about them running out any time soon. Chex mix, snack mixes, dried fruits, granola, seemingly half of Whole Foods, a good portion of some Army PX in Afganistan, books, cds, and a great new pair of sandals. The list is probably not even half complete, but I am on battery power and time runs short.
  I need to mention one other thing - soap. I know people want me to be clean here, and I did well to mention Lever 2000 apparently. I am hopefully able to upload a picture to show you what I mean. Seemingly I need to remember to bathe more often at home, because now I am cleaner than I usually was there, and people want me to stay that way.
  I love you all, thank you so much for a truly amazing Christmas. The fact that it came in bursts and lasted all the way until the end of January makes it even better. Maybe I'll start a new tradition...