My future revealed

So I guess I lied when I said I would be getting to internet more frequantly. It takes a while to get into a routine here and while I have not been working per say I have been busy hanging out in the village which is kind of my job for the first couple of months. It is also hard asserting my self as an independent being as someone in my family or my counterpart tends to accompany me where ever I go and my first solo trip into town earlier this week was a bust because the power was out. I am posting an entry I typed up a couple of weeks ago below.

Since then I have been doing much of the same of trying to get to know my village a speak some Pulaar but I did have one interesting day this week when I visited a private health care facility outside of my village. The previous volunteer at my site was a health volunteer and she spent some time at this man's disponsaire helping take blood pressure, so last Tuesday I decided to spend the day there helping out and getting to know him and some of the people in the area a little better. His name is Daude Fall and everyone refers to him as the doctor but Im not sure what his actual medical background is. He does both Western and traditional medicine and is pretty well known for his herbal medicine (he has been invited to do a seminar in California next year). In between patients he informed me that he reads fortunes and so he did mine. I will apparently live to the age of 82, get married between the age of 25 and 26 and have four children, two girls and two boys. I will be marrying some with the initial of either M, D, or S because those are the only men who do not lie to me and if I am not careful I will have problems with blood pressure and sugar around the age of 45. Also everyone Monday I am supposed to give out milk until I am 24 or 25 and if I do this I will get a good job. He also does fortunes over the phone so let me know if you want his number or if you are in need of any herbal remedies because I believe he ships his medicine internationally.

Also one of my host sisters had a baby on Monday. Names here are really important and children tend to be named after someone, when I got my name in the village I was named after one of my sisters. Well the family has decided to name the new baby after my father, so he will be called Baaba Joe (they will also give him a Senegalese name). One of my other sisters had a son when the previous volunteer was here and he was named after her father so now there is a Baaba Steve and a Baaba Joe in the village. Baaba Joe is having his baptism this weekend so I will try and take some pictures and update about that at some point in the future.

I'm going to leave this post with a riddle of sorts. Well it sounds like it could be a riddle if it wasn't an actual problem I was facing: How do you keep monkeys from eating a garden?