Henna and Hippos

Hello everyone!  Hope you are all doing well.  I’m still loving life in Africa! 

Last week we celebrated the end of Ramadan with a two-day holiday called Koriteh.  It consisted of a lot of sitting around with my family, visiting friends, and eating a lot of food.  I’d compare it to our Christmas or Easter.  I woke up on the first day to the sound of one of our goats screaming and when I came out of my room my host sister Fatou (my Toma) took me to see the goat, already butchered.  They cooked it and we ate it for lunch and dinner.  Not my favorite dish but I’ve learned to tolerate almost anything put in front of me to eat.  My gorgeous sisters got all dressed up and had their hair put in beautiful braids and my host mom braided my hair too.  Then I got my feet and one hand hennaed—a tradition some women do for celebrations.  My wonderful neighbor came over to put little strips of tape all over my feet in a spider-webby looking design, coated it with henna, put bags over my feet and hand and left it like that over night.  Then in the morning we took it off and it had dyed my skin a dark orange color.  Really awesome.  Not sure how long it will stay but it’s been about a week and a half and it’s still there!  During Koriteh kids also walked around the village and asked for candy or money, kind of like trick-or-treating.  And to top off the festivities I got to go watch my village’s boys play a football match against the next town over.  It was a good few days!

The other interesting thing I’ve done lately was take a field trip to an island called JanJanBureh.  It’s in the middle of the Gambia river, in the central river region, which is the region I will be moving to in a couple weeks.  We had to take a little boat across the river to get to the camp we were staying in.  When we stepped onto land at JanJanBureh Camp we were greeted by several monkeys swinging around in trees and hovering around the dining area, waiting for someone to turn their eyes away from their food for a second so they could steal a piece of bread.  Those little stinkers were quick!  Luckliy I didn’t get anything stolen, but I did get to watch one of our Peace Corps staff members chase a monkey around after he stole his mango.  So great!  While in JJB we went on a boat tour with the slight hope of seeing some hippos.  We were so excited to not only see one hippo but a big group of them hanging out in the river, usually with just their ears and noses sticking out of the water.  We also were greeted by a group of chimpanzees and some baboons along the way.  Boat trip = huge success!  We stayed 2 nights in little thatch-roof huts at the camp, which I am pretty sure is what I will be living in once I move up to my site.

This week I am staying in the transit house, which is a house for Peace Corps volunteers to stay in when they come to the city.  We are doing a workshop tomorrow and the next day with our supervisors we will be working with when we go to site, and then Wednesday we all are traveling to our sites for a few days to meet our families and see our schools.  I’m excited to see where I’m going to be spending my next two years, but I’m also kind of bummed to be leaving my training village.  I’ve come to really love my life I’ve been living and in a couple weeks I’m going to be changing everything again.  Gambians are so friendly and welcoming; I’m going to miss my host family and friends I’ve made here so much!  Mariama Kunda has been added to the long list of homes I have in this world, and it’s almost time to add a little town called Lebba to this list, too.