Friday, March 25, 2011

Spring Break 2k11!

Its hard to believe that my time here is already half over. Time has
gone by a lot faster than it did in Duekoue, maybe because school is
actually in session here! Its also very different being in a village
rather than in a town like Duekoue.

Last sunday I went to a different village with one of the priests and
sr adriana for mass. It was said under mango trees, the pews were tree
trunks and afterwards everyone ate together. Sometimes I think 'wow
what a nice life' but then i think yeah its nice to visit and then go
back to our house with running water and electricity...and we eat
things besides various forms of millet. For breakfast they eat mush
made from millet. For lunch they eat to (pronounced like toe) which is
made from millet...the texture is maybe like thick, wet oatmeal. Then
for dinner you guessed it... millet! 'To' again. To make 'to' you have
to put it in a big wooden bowl and pound it with one of those big
sticks. Sorry I dont know the words for those things. Anyway that
takes a long time and is really tiring. Sometimes though they eat
cous-cous...made from millet. and they drink dolo...made from millet.

The people spend about half the year planting and harvesting their
fields. Then they put it in their 'granier' and that has to last until
next year. So this is the kind of place where they have famines
because if it doesnt rain and you dont have a huge supply stored up,
you dont have anything to eat. Kind of a precarious food situation
there.

So sometimes its easy to think 'what a nice simple life' but thats not
the truth at all. Life is really hard and the stakes are higher. The
closest big hospital is in San, an hour and a half from Touba by car
so who knows how long that would take by motorcycle or donkey cart. If
you get hurt or really sick, theres not too much that can be done and
some people wait a year to name their babies to see if they'll live.
The difference between life here and life in the US or other developed
countries is so absurdly huge that i cant really understand it.

We are in San today to get some groceries and do some other errands.
The baker's oven broke so we havent had bread for a week so we'll
probably buy all of the bread San has to offer. This is the start of
Spring break so we have off all next week. The dispensary is still
open so I'll do that and Im in the process of putting covers on a
bunch of books. SPRING BREAK!!

I'm going to stop because I'm getting really hungry but hopefully Ill
be able to write again soon.


bye!

No comments:

Post a Comment