A Tree in Africa

During an internet search I stumbled across this video of our Costa Rican friend's Missionary project. At time 6:19 in the video there is a nice close-up of Ngone's older sister Aissatou's daughter.  Then at time 6:30 in the video you can see Ngone's uncle Housseini and Ngone's mother Fatou Diouf sitting with the Costa Rican missionary (with the beard) in front of our house under construction in Boukhou.  Apparently some of the families have removed their children from the Missionary home in Thies because of the Christian activities. But Ngone's mother has been a key local supporter of the Missionary, as has Jig Jum.

At that point in the video it makes it seem like the Missionary is saving the little boy on his lap from his grandmother (Ngone's mother) sending him to be a Talibe. That is true in a sense. But the boy shown in the video is not Ngone's mother's grandson. The Missionary is however taking care of one of Ngone's mother's grandsons and two of her granddaughters. (Girls are not allowed to be Talibes).  Ngone's mother did previously send one of her other grandsons to be a Talibe, our nephew Dao Pooy, but he's now back at home. He is doing fine and is the boy we took to the hospital to cast his sprained ankle. That trip to the hospital is a whole nother story:

Hospitals in Senegal are a very sad place. In the emergency room I talked with a mother consoling her son with his head broke open who had been to the hospital multiple times and they just gave her token prescriptions and her son was now obviously on the verge of death and she was fighting to get attention from the doctors who were busy caring for other people we could see and hear who were about to die. The condition of the hospital rooms and bathrooms is worse than some of the grungiest places in the country. There must be foreign aid money coming in from France and the USA for the hospital!? There must be national government money for the hospital!? Where is it falling through the cracks? We actually met a cousin of Ngone's from a nearby village who worked in or around the emergency room as a nurse or doctor and was very nice and helpful and took care of Dao Pooy. There are surely some other saints and angels there amongst the intense despair and hopelessness. They need help!

Chip In

When Ngone called home recently she found out that her younger sister Khady (introduced earlier in this blog) had been laying on her mother's bed for a couple weeks sick and without eating anything.  She also found out that her older sister Ami's daughter was seriously ill. Ngone sent home some of her hard-earned money to pay for their doctor's visits.

I have found over the years that paying for doctor visits and prescriptions and annual school fees and supplies are the most effective ways to help.  But you kind of have to wait for someone to call in need.  Inevitably they do.

In the spirit of Ngone I am setting up a fund to help pay for doctor visits and school fees, and will be reaching out to provide that assistance to those outside her family.  Over the years I have found that a doctor visit and prescription costs around $40, and annual school fees and supplies for one student around $30.

Be one of 111 people to contribute $3 to this fund by Bob Marley's 64th birthday, February 6th, 2009! Thank you for supporting these strong people in their hour of need, and I will keep you posted with stories of who and what the money goes to. We are setting up the fund with an earlier donation from my Uncle Tom Vaught of Springfield, Illinois. Just click on the Chip In link to the right and you will be connected to PayPal directly to make a secure donation using a credit card.

No Rice

After we left this summer we heard from Ngone's family that there was no more rice in Senegal! Due to shortages some Asian countries banned exporting it. The people of Senegal drastically altered their diet to eat couscous-based or potato-based meals instead. The Serere people - a large ethnic region which includes Ngone's village - traditionally ate couscous-based meals, so this was in a way like a return to that traditional diet. But for a couple decades now they have been accustomed to eating rice at lunch and couscous at dinner.

Rice and many other foods have increased dramatically in price over the past year.

My Personal Post-Development Perspective (MPPDP)

I discussed with like minded friends and family my dream for doing development work on this trip to Senegal, and possibly staying on if all went well. So I wanted to give my final informal treatise on that subject. I have become consumed with the subject of West African development for the past 8 years. My development philosophies have been largely influenced by my Peace Corps service in Mali and by my wife Ngone (from Senegal).



The ultimate test of a development project is its sustainability. All projects start with a good idea, but most end failing the critical test of sustainability, maybe either because the local people could not afford needed repairs or the priorities of the local community did not match those of the donor community who installed the project. As I learned in Peace Corps training these failed projects are littered across the landscape of West Africa, in the form of broken well pumps, empty school buildings, health centers with no maintenance or equipment, etc. Over the years I have come to believe that the entire concept of development is largely unsustainable. The idea that foreign aid or capital will start a project sets up an expectation gap that the project can only materialize or continue properly with outside aid and/or advice. A current example is a Peace Corps Volunteer we met in Dakar this time around who managed a USAID-funded garden to provide "sustainable" nutritition to patients at the AIDS clinic of the hospital. The garden was surviving with continued doses of funding, but it was a very expensive garden, and the volunteer observed a lot of funding going to waste, not confident how it will do after he leaves. The volunteer decided to start his own garden with no funding in the psychiatry ward of the hospital, which received no USAID or outside funding "because it's not AIDS-related". He built the raised garden beds with used tires. And his garden was doing almost as well as the expensive one built with foreign aid. This volunteer's approach is similar to mine. I find it very troubling to engage in the imperfect top-down development process, and choose instead to look for home-grown endeavors.



To give you an idea of the development work I pursued on this trip, I visited many water and sanitation NGOs in Dakar. I met with the directors of USAID and Peace Corps, and also with officials of those organizations. I attended a water and sanitation conference and spoke with various NGOs, Senegalese government agencies, European and Senegalese engineering firms. A German engineering firm interviewed me about representing them on a proposal in Mauritania. But they ultimately decided not to submit a proposal. They had a German educated Senegalese engineer representing them in Senegal but had not yet won any projects in Senegal (not a good sign for my engineering prospects). I have also conducted research by internet and telephone over the past few years with contacts in Senegal and Mali. What I have gathered is that a lot of the international funding for water and sanitation projects has shifted to the more remote regions, such as Mali and Niger. See for example the West Africa Water Initiative. I spoke with the World Vision director for this project and he told me they had constructed hundreds of bore holes across Senegal over many years. His NGO has now found local Senegalese, Malian, etc engineers to do their water work for much lower salaries than American engineers. I met some Americans who work for NGOs and they told me I could expect a salary of about $1,000 per month to start. Over a year or two I could work my way up the ladder to a better salary. This cumulative research added together with the rapidly increasing cost of living in Dakar led me to decide that we should not stay in Senegal for the long-term. But instead we should focus on the rural projects we had started, including our house in Ngone's village and building on our land on the beach outside Mboro. But also small grassroots projects in those regions. This work is not going to save the world but is something our family can do. We have already provided assistance for annual school tuition fees for our nieces, keeping all the young girls in school, and have sent money for prescriptions and hospital visits when people get seriously ill. This has been relatively small amounts of money, less than we spend on gas. For example annual schools fees are about $40. A hospital visit is usually around $30 or $40.

One last day of idealism:
Ngone's brother Abibou is a master plumber and Uncle Jig Jum has worked with numerous missionaries and NGOs over the years, especially the Dutch missionaries in Ngone's village. After visiting the missionary with Aissatou's children in Thies we were all feeling especially inspired. We set out one day early in the morning to visit a couple water NGOs in Thies who develop water projects with international funding. I had drilled Jig Jum to identify the most remote, desperate village in the Serere-Safin region without water. He told me of Thouly, an especially remote village where they really need help with water. The women walk 5 to 10 kilometers each way to get water and their groundwater table is very deep (upwards of 30 or 40 meters). So we went to Eau Vive (Living Water) and L'eau pour tout l'Afrique (Water for all of Africa) in Thies. When we walked into Eau Vive the receptionist offered us a seat and we explained who we were. Jig Jum had come to their office the previous day and waited 4 hours to speak with someone who told him to come back the next morning with me. The receptionist explained that this person had traveled to another region and that the other engineers were "out of the office." We explained the situation in Thouly and she said they received a request for funding from Thouly a couple years ago. Jig Jum was familiar with Thouly's previous efforts and discouragement. She told us there are all kinds of villages who have requested funding and their NGO evaluates all requests, but there's a lack of available funding. She said to come back next week. Discouraged, we left. I said, "here I am the American asking for funding and they're looking at me like I'm the one whose supposed to be providing the funding." We went to L'eau pour tout l'Afrique (Water for all of Africa). The office was closed and a little girl said the guy who works there is gone. (Guess he's out getting that water for Africa. It's easy to get discouraged doing this type of work in Africa but I had seen this all before during my two years in Peace Corps. Every office I went to, it was always "come back next week." I've grown awfully tired of the symbiotic system of patronage and powerlessness. I believe the only solution is the "third way." My brother Abibou is a great example of the skilled labor force in Africa that is slowly and surely developing the continent to a high standard. These energies are channeling themselves into successful small entrepeneurizm all over the continent, with minimal capital. Abibou now seeks out free lance plumbing work after initially working as an apprentice with no pay for many years.)

We then went to the Government's Regional Direction of Hydraulics, which Jig Jum had been told the previous day we needed to visit before doing any water project in the region. We found five men sitting under an overhang in the shade and a machine shed with one old dead front end loader. We parked and walked to the main office, but there was no one there. There were a couple computers on dusty desks with covers over them. Two elderly men on the porch greeted us warmly and offered us tea. We walked back around to the parking lot and found a back building again with a covered computer on a dusty desk, but with a back air-conditioned office with a government official shuffling papers on his desk and gruffing at an underling. He curtly offered us a seat and listened to us. He began to understand the situation in Thouly and said drilling a well and putting up a small water tank would cost $50,000 to $100,000 or more. He said like everybody else there's not enough funding. I think he might of even mentioned something about the President's other priorities but I can't remember. I said there's no way I can collect that kind of funding from church groups in the United States. He said the Director was at a meeting today and would be back the next day, and that we should come back to get his advice. I decided it wasn't worth it to drive all the way back to Thies when chances are he'd be at another meeting or "out of the office." Jig Jum, Abibou, and I passed by the missionary again to get our spirits up with some young African smiles and evangelical prayer circles. We decided not to visit Thouly after all. Jig Jum said the rock and dirt road to get there could possibly be impassable in my Camry. Ngone had warned me that if I showed up in that village they'd think God had come to them and then when God did not deliver they would say it was because of the daughter of Fatou Diouf (Ngone's mother). She said to be very careful not to promise them anything. So on the way back I said if we can't do a water supply project maybe we can do an irrigation/agriculture project. Jig Jum and Abibou thought it was a great idea and Jig Jum took us to a very remote village, called Sipan, where a missionary had helped install a reservoir and pipe from the well. The villagers grew tomatoes, eggplants, okra, and other vegetables in a large field. But the elders told me the young people don't help them water the plants, so even though they're supposed to water in the morning and the evening, they only water every evening, it's just too tiring. Standing out there in the middle of nowhere under the oppressive afternoon sun I could believe it. Most of the young people work in Dakar so the village contains just the elderly, women and children. I could tell the plants were thirsty and could really produce more with that morning water.

We talked about developing a project like this in Ngone's village. There is a rich tradition of agriculture but it has all now almost completely been abandoned with all the young people focused on working in Dakar during the week and only coming back to the village on the weekends. From discussing the project idea in detail I came to realize that each family would be more focused on their own benefit than the traditional communal approach. I think the future of agriculture in this region is inevitably going to be on a capitalist model, for better or worse. I'd like to buy the mango orchard next to our village house and develop it into a farm and hardware/plumbing shop. There's another villager trying to develop his own farm on some family land. He recently put in a well and is getting his farm in order "little by little," ("danka danka" in Wolof, "doni doni" in Bambara) as all across Africa.

As for water supply, piped water has made its way to the more accessible villages including Ngone's village. And 10 to 20 km away are the suburbs of Dakar with new subdivision developments with piped water and sewers. The suburbs are rapidly expanding. The new international airport is being built 5 km further out from Ngone's village. All that nearby modern development is the future of water for this part of Africa. But it's also plenty obvious that the villagers will continue to guard their traditional ways, at least as a back-up plan, as they construct and adopt modern lifestyles.

Pharoahs

Jig Jum is a local historian and has traced the genealogy of Ngone's ethnic group, the Serere-Safin, back 28 generations. The Serere-Safin origins are with those who fled slavery in Egypt around 600 BC. A famous Senegalese historian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheikh_Anta_Diop) argued that the Wolof ethnic group of Senegal are true descendants of the pharoahs of ancient Egypt (check out that link for a fascinating discussion of his originally very controversial theories). However Jig Jum contends that it was not the Wolof but the Serere-Safin who are the true descendants of the pharoahs. The Wolof ethnic group was created as a combination of languages only around the year 1300. But the Serere, Bambara and Peul of the surrounding region of West Africa are true descendants who fled Egypt around 600 BC, and also more truly exhibit the respectful practices of the ancient culture. The Serere and Peul were of the same origins and lived along the Senegal River in northern Senegal until a group explored down to the coast south of the cap vert peninsula of Dakar, where they reached the Atlantic Ocean, stopped, and became the Serere-Safin. The oldest dated fossilized bones in Senegal are from the Serere-Safin region.

Jig Jum, Ngone's brother Abibou, and I visited a remote Serere-Safin village named Sipan to look at an agriculture project initiated by a missionary. After visiting the vegetable field we walked on out to the Baobab forest you see above. Ngone had explained to me that Baobab trees are the homes of the spirits, or ghosts. We looked out at dozens of mounds dotted throughout the forest. The elders explained to me the traditional burial process:

Up until a few years ago the Serere-Safin buried the richest amongst them in buried pyramids. They buried a person's home and belongings with them and each village would then come with all the men piling on a whole lot of sand all day long. At the end of the day that village would sacrifice a cow giving its blood to the spirits (drip into the earth), the meat for the villagers to eat, and place the cow's head at the top of the mound. Then another village would come the next day and repeat the ritual placing another cow's head at the top of the mound, until the mound grew larger and larger.

More about Pharoahs

Ngone, Kathleen Aiza and David Ibrahima's genealogy

Kindred Spirits

Jig Jum reminds me of my uncle Louis Savage. It would be great if they could meet but I don't think that day will ever come, except right here on this blog.

My grandfather commented that Jig Jum also reminds him of his Great Great Uncle Joe Walker.  According to Guv, back in the 1840s Old Joe was what was called a Mountain Man of the Rocky Mountains, which were then remote obviously. They mostly trapped beavers. When they had enough skins they would come down out of the mountains to sell them, spend all their money, and then go back to trapping.  They were fond of the Indians but wary of them stealing their pelts, guns, and knives.  Some of their friends married Indian women.  Old Joe was respected by all of his compatriots and he guided emigrant parties from time to time on both the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail.  The book The Oregon Trail, by David Dary, describes Old Joe Walker guiding a party of emigrants from Kansas to California, blazing a new trail through the Sierra Nevada Mountains using a newly found pass which is still called Walker Pass.  It is at about 5,250 feet elevation, south of Owens Peak in modern Kern County, California.  The book also describes Old Joe's encounter with Peg Leg Smith at his trading post in Idaho.  Old Joe held his foot while it was cut off after he had been shot by an Indian.

Baobab

This Boabab tree has been dated at 1,300 years old. The Baobabs are called the upside down trees because they look like their roots are sticking up in the air. They dot the flat landscape of West Africa. They are especially beautiful around dusk when the dust glows in the air. But in the day time they provide little shade from the oppressive sun. They produce a dry fruit which is used to make a tasty juice, which has medicinal qualities for digestion (it's an anti-laxative). When a fully ripe dry fruit drops from the tree and hits the ground it can spark a fire.

Missionaries from Costa Rica

We heard that two of Ngone's sister Aissatou's daughters are now living at an "American" school in Thies. So one day we went to visit them with Aissatou and Ngone's uncle Jig Jum Jon (also known Baye Fat, Mara, or Aliou). Jig Jum is also teaching me Wolof.

We entered a beautiful villa in Thies and soon started chatting in French with the Pastor, a missionary from Costa Rica. He has about 15 kids living in the home and they are teaching them French, Spanish, and English, along with computers, bible teachings and other life skills. They also attend the local public school. They will live there up until the age of 18, when he feels they will have gained a solid foundation for the rest of their lives. He explained his approach also as very purposely oriented around the concept of family. He told Ngone and I that his father was a "metisse" African descendant from the east coast of Costa Rica (originally from the freedom seekers who fled Jamaica), so he feels the blood connection to Africa and has always wanted to pursue that.

Jig Jum apparently met this missionary through a mutual friend and has also apparently arranged a number of the children to live there. As the kids filed out to shake our hands and say bonjour he proceeded to greet all of them in Ngone's family's local dialect. (In fact he greets almost everyone he meets in this local dialect). Regardless, I can vouch for the genuine need for Aissatou's daughters to receive assistance. When I first met Aissatou she was very skinny and frail and impressed me tremendously with her perseverance, kindness and honesty. She has had a very difficult life since her first husband completely abandoned her and her first four kids (he has definitely missed out). It is great to see her now much stronger and healthier, and much credit goes to Ngone (and my Uncle Tom) for encouraging her to leave her husband's village and go work in the capital. But just last night I learned that she still often skips dinner and walks a few kilometers home each night from work to save transportation money.

This missionary visit really made me feel better about the efforts Ngone and I have made to help her family. To see a group going farther than us with their work and sacrifice helps give us a positive vision. And the family focus of their work is heartwarming.

One of the girls working there for a few months is from Milwaukee. She's shown in the picture above. She was an Americorps volunteer and never thought she would do missionary work but here she is. She is a member of the church in Milwaukee.

Black Magic

As I mentioned earlier I was excited to sleep on my roof under the stars. Well little did I know the controversy I would stir up with this seemingly simple act. No one in the village sleeps outside. They believe that at night the evil spirits come out. Ngone was so scared in the tent that she was shaking and couldn't sleep. She was the first person of the village in hundreds (or thousands) of years to sleep outdoors. So I broke some longstanding traditions to say the least.

Ngone's mother is a traditional medecine woman specializing in fertility. She became a medecine woman back in 2001 or so when she started having visions. She is able to communicate with the spirits. But there are also other traditional medicine men (called Marabouts) who do bad things against people with these powers.

Ngone's mother was told about a new Marabout in a nearby village who came from Mali. So she took us to visit him. He looked like a young man but was actually in his 40s. He said he has a son in the United States, but he lives in a small rented room in a village house with no furniture except for two floor mats. He told us that he couldn't sleep the night before because he knows there is a gris-gris (like a voodoo charm) planted in Ngone's mother's house. He proceeded to read our futures in the sand. Then that night he walked to the house (he doesn't take wheels). He sat in the middle of the compound with Ngone's brother. Then he got up and walked next to the entry door. He pointed at a place in the ground and told Ngone's brother Abdou to dig there. Abdou dug down a few inches and sure enough hit a small thing which looked like a cut goat's horn with things stuffed inside. It looked old. I wouldn't believe he knew exactly where that gris-gris was buried if I didn't witness him point to its location myself. And Ngone and her brothers are almost as skeptical about all this stuff as you and I. He proceeded to say special prayers to cancel the evil effects, including flipping two shells that happened to land open side up, whose openness ensured freedom from evil. The two pictures above are him digging a new hole for the new gris-gris he planted to protect the house.

I also included a picture with the eldest Imam of the village. He prayed at every baptism and funeral, but is now retired and Ngone's mother's husband has taken over that task. The elder's wife is Ngone's father's (he died when Ngone was a few years old) sister. The other pictures are of her (the lady smiling with Ngone) and Ngone's mother.

Ngone's younger sister

We visited Ngone's younger sister Khady where she lives in her husband's village, Cinquante (Cinquante means 50 in French and denotes 50 kilometers from Dakar). She cooked a chicken and rice dish for us called thiebuginaar. My sister Julie had given $20 to Khady as a Christmas present, so we gave that to her. We also gave her the tricycle we had bought for Kathleen Aiza. She was so happy to see Ngone and very appreciative of the gifts. Her husband tried to buy a piece of land to build a house, but the guy who sold it ate his money and sold it to someone else. So they are still living in a room in his mother's house in the village. Khady loves her inlaws. She is so happy there and they love her too. She now speaks their dialect of Serere. She certainly reminds me of my sister Julie, and my wife Ngone.

When I was in Peace Corps in Kayes with Ngone back in 2002 we heard by telephone that Khady was having twins. Ngone was so jealous because she always wanted to have twins. When Ngone was visiting her family before we left for the United States, the twin boy Adama, a big strong little boy, was sick. He got so sick Khady, Ngone and their mother took a taxi to the hospital. But on the way he died in Ngone's lap in the backseat of the taxi. This was a very tragic event for the family of course. But after that she had another baby boy. And since then she's had another girl and boy. She now has four kids: Awa, Papa, Ngone (named after my wife), and Mor, and she's the happiest, most innocent young lady in the world.

The goat sacrifice

We sacrificed a goat to celebrate my sister Erica's graduation from college. Ngone's brother Lassy and Kevin took turns carrying the goat on their shoulders from the nearby Pulaar village. I performed the halal ritual with the eagle knife my grandfather gave to me to take to Africa. Ngone's brother Abibou butchered it masterfully. As I cut its neck I said, as instructed, "Bissimilah, Allah Akbar, God bless America and Erica!"

Car broke down in Saint Louis

The first shot is of the car broke down in Saint Louis. We had to jump start it and then it started overheating while we were stopped to eat breakfast on the side of the road. So I couldn't turn off the car until we got somewhere where we could get it started again. So I got in and drove in circles around downtown Saint Louis as fast as I could to get it to cool off (with the kids in the backseat), while Ngone finished her breakfast. Then I did a drive by and picked up Ngone and Kevin and we hit the road across the bridge to the gas station. Luckily traffic wasn't backed up at the bridge construction as it usually was. This shot is at the mechanic across the street from the gas station. He asked for 5 dollars for repairing the radiator hose and recharging the battery. Then we were off to Boukhou, where we push started the car to get to the baptism in a remote village where you saw me trying to get a push start in the previous post. Once we got back to Dakar we figured out the problem was the alternator, and got that replaced for 40 dollars. Car parts and labor are two of the few things that are still cheap in Dakar.

The other pictures are from the baptism, which was in the village of our nieces Nana and Oumya and nephew Pape's mother, Ndeye Diouf. Ndeye has run restaurants in the streets of some of the roughest parts of Dakar. Nana was always the waitress and cook's assistant, and the food was always excellent. Now Ndeye cooks for a Lebanese family. She's a very hard working and very nice lady.

Bye Kevin

Here's a shot of me getting a push start when our car broke down in a remote village, with my wife looking on in amusement.

Djoudj

A highlight of Kevin's visit was our visit to the National Park Djoudj, outside of Saint Louis. The cartoon map made it look like about 10 km on a dirt road, but it turned out to be 30 km, giving me a lot of practice off-roading over levees in the bush in our Camry.

Besides the dozens of pelicans, african cormorants, and a few african eagles, we saw families of wild wart hogs, two monkeys on the run, a couple lazy crocodiles, and a python. But apparently the non-native species shown above has corrupted the remaining image files ^$*=

The Goat Whisperer

My buddy Kevin came to visit for a couple weeks. He grew up on a goat farm outside of Davis, California, so has taken special interest in some of the unique sights and sounds of Senegal.

We worked together as solid waste engineers at the LA County Sanitation Districts. We've had a blast cruising around Senegal, playing with the kids, and basically just chillin. This weekend we're going to catch a couple live shows here in Dakar. Then we're heading out to the village to sacrifice a goat and share it with the village in honor of my sister Erica's graduation. And sleep under the african stars on our roof.

Outside Shots

Great Uncle Moussa on the left.

More House Pics 2

Ngone's brother Lassy with the blue jacket and green hat. Ngone's brother Abibou with the blue hat and white tank top. Great Uncle Moussa leading the masonry. And my buddy Kevin.

More House Pics

House and Events Update

We are splitting our time between an apartment in Dakar, just behind the airport, and our newly constructed house in Ngone's village Boukhou. Boukhou is about 35 km Southeast of Dakar.

The pictures above are of our village house. There will be one more coat of paint, which Ngone has picked to be a silverish white. We have spent 3 years constructing it. The work has been managed by Ngone's older brother Lassi, who has taken it as a point of pride to prove what he and his family can do for us. We have heard a number of stories of him lecturing the workers how the money to build this house was made by hard work in the United States, and also how some workers have refused to work for him because he is too cheap and works people too hard.

The main components of the building have been constructed by Ngone's family members. Ngone's brother Abibou is a master plumber and I have been amazed watching him heat sand-filled PVC pipe with a gas-fired flame to form multiple elbows and joints using both hands and feet at the same time. The flame thrower and other plumbing materials were purchased with funding from my Uncle Tom (more on that to come). Those materials have enabled him to get work recently in the southern region of Casamance to help support the family.

Another cousin has a business laying tile. Another cousin is a painter. A great uncle is a mason with 40 years experience. Another uncle is an electrician. Another cousin installs solar panels. And there are plenty of mechanics for our car. They have built our house to a fine western standard, showing very clearly that they could all construct their own homes to that standard if they could just afford it. In fact they have told me that their local ethnic group, the Serere-Safin, have constructed most of the wealthiest parts of Dakar, and pointed out a number of modern buildings which they or their cousins worked on.

Also our house is equipped with a concrete terrace roof for lounging and sleeping underneath the stars, which at 3000 dollars was the most expensive part of the building. Also midway through construction Lassi suggested adding the porch, which is well worth it for an additional play area, added breeze, and an additional level of privacy and security. I will post more pictures of the house soon.

Our apartment in Dakar is on the 3rd floor with sliding glass screened windows, which leaves us with no mosquitos indoors. It is a 3 bedroom apartment with nice tiling and has never been lived in. The owner of the building is an elder Catholic man who is very nice. He told us he has two kids in the United States, so he doesn't need money, he just needs peace.

Kathleen is attending a French pre-school and Ngone has started two classes, French and Math, at a nearby school. David is enjoying the good spoiled life, spending most of his time lounging in the apartment. We have our niece Mariam living with us to help watch him when we go out. I have been networking with NGOs, American government organizations, and almost lined up a one week consulting gig in Mauritania for a German engineering firm, but they decided not to propose on the project.

The obvious highlight of my networking has been hanging out with Sam Perkins of the LA Lakers at a reception for the United States Peace Corps Director at the Senegal Peace Corps Director's residence here in Dakar. He was super cool, asking where I lived in LA and telling me where he's lived. He was here with some other NBA scouts visiting a basketball academy in Thies that was set up by a Senegalese NBA player. I told him about my Senegalese friend who lives in the Valley and used to play basketball in Senegal. I said back in the day maybe he could have taken advantage of that basketball academy but eventually found another way to get to LA. I said he's "probably 6' 4", and Sam just looked right down at me and said "I'm 6' 9". With my neck leaned back to look up at him I didn't have much more to say about that. I also enjoyed chatting with Toni Blackman, a self-described "Hip-Hop Ambassador". Check out toniblackman.com

Sister and Brother

Playing

Daviebou is enjoying his new sense of mobility in the walker toy Ngone bought for him. But the fun really begins when his sister pushes him around at high speeds.