Parties and more trees

I am writing this entry holed up awaiting the onslaught of a sand storm which is exactly what it sounds like. This week brought me two good days in a row, on Wednesday I went to a nearby village and did a presentation on tree nurseries and then on Thursday the kids in my counterparts class threw him a surprise going away party.

Ill start with the tree nursery presentation. Well the word presentation may be a bit of an exageration but it makes it sound like I am actually doing work. Anyways I headed out to this tiny village on the island across the river from me via about an hour plus trip on two different charettes (horse carts). Once I got there I sat around for a while, drank some tea and milk, and from about six different bowls of rice and fish for lunch, sat around some more, drank more tea and then around 5:00 spent about half an hour constructing a tree nursery with about twenty people helping out. During this whole "presentation" I said less than twenty words and then my final speech about why this is good and what other work we could do together in the future had to be translated from French because they were laughing too hard at my Pulaar, so my language is coming along great if you were wondering. Even though it wasn't the most informative way to go about this whole environmental education thing, it was something resembling work which made me feel useful and hopefully a couple of those seeds we planted will turn survive and prosper. We planted what are reffered to as Never Dies (I think the Latin name is Moringa) so hopefully the name is right. They are the same trees that I am growing in my own tree nursery of that I posted a picture of.
Thursday was my counterparts last day in the village, teachers in Senegal are assigned schools to work in, so most do not teach in the same place they are from, so they only live in the village during the school year and go home for vacation, I tend to spend most days at his house because I like his and his family's company (he has a wife, two boys who are 8 and 6 and a baby girl who was born in September and who absolutley hates me) and begun to eat most meals at his house because they eat at good times which is important here (they eat lunch at 1 and dinner at 8:30, where as my family eats lunch around 2:30 and dinner anytime between 9:30 and 11:30- anything thing after 10:30 I refuse to eat when they knock on my door seeing as I am asleep) anyways, I was sitting with my counterpart before dinner when his entire class (he teaches the equivelent of 4th grade but the kids are around 11 years old) walks into the compound with a tray of snacks. They ended up hanging around to midnight singing and dancing. My favorite kid in the class, who finished 1st in the class is also quite the rapper so he did a few renditions of his favorite songs. It was probably my favorite night in the village so far, not only to see the kids get a chance to hang out and have some fun but also to see how much they cared about their teacher. These are the kids I will probably be working with the most next school year so it was pretty cool to see how they came together for their teacher.