Sunday Afternoon

The rainy season is still hot most days, but there are the occasional cool days, and that unpredictability is delicious. We are near at the end of the rains, probably going to end in two or three weeks, with fewer and fewer storms as it goes along. Just when my gutter has gotten on track.
Soon it will be the hard heat of October, humid and hot in one last sweaty blast. It's not that the heat is as hard as I thought it would be, but it's more tiring than anything else, and it's also Ramadan. No one from my compound saw the moon last night, but today was the official start in most places, so the fasting has begun without us. I'm planning to join in this year, we'll see for how long. Perhaps after a week I'll be hating it and start eating on my own. But it's an interesting time to be here, and a good point in my service to do it - as adjusted as I'm going to be, and in relative fitness from a summer spent eating well. Food and nutrition are such a part of life here, I enjoy the basic-ness of it.
Two days ago was the presidential election. Yesterday it was announced that Dr. Alh. Something or other Yaya J. J. Jammeh won again, probably by a ridiculously huge margin. I'll not discuss that, but both days were peaceful to my knowledge, and people were excited about the process. Hopefully schools will open tomorrow, perhaps (probably) the day will be declared a national holiday in celebration of the victory. It would be a good time to really get started with the school year, which opened almost a month ago.
One great benefit of the election, to me at least, is that we now have public electricity in Fara Fenni. It has been on every day I've been home, usually for more than twelve hours at a time. So, I'm able to have my computer on a lot more, and thus write during the middle of the day, at home, more easily. The solar panel is good, but not strong enough to charge my batteries very quickly if I run them all the way down. The public electricity, however, is great at charging them, and if it keeps staying on so much, I have as much power as I could want. All sorts of new ideas spring to mind!