Visiting the new volunteer

The month of May has been full with following up on tree nurseries and latrines, as well as enjoying the weather cooling down, you know, only highs of 100 and cooling down to 80 in the evenings (and even a couple of rains!). I also have been trying to get the well finished in my village. So, as a means of getting out and about, Tatiana and I decided to go visit the closest new health volunteer, Katie (who has only been at site for just over three weeks). We first stopped in a village, Kewoye (20km away), where her mason is, and the man (his brother) who had said he would finish digging the well in Diara Pont, who also wanted to start a mango nursery. Sara Cidy Bay, the well digger, unfortunately had gone to Guinea for the day. However, we were able to show his brother how to fill tree sacks. We were then invited to lunch (at 11am, ensuring us that we would eat in an hour) where they killed a chicken for us to eat. However, we did not eat until nearly 2:30pm. Afterwards, we decided to continue on to Dakateli, another 12km to Katie's village. The cell phone service in our area had been out for a week, so we were not able to coordinate and let her know we were coming. However, she had expressed interest in going to Salemata for our weekly market the following day so we figured we could show her the bush path/shortcut. However, upon arriving in her village, we were told that she left for Salemata that morning! Her brother ended up showing us her compound, but then we decided to turn around and leave relatively quickly so we would get back to our villages before dark. Unfortunately, my bike seat had broken upon arriving in Dakateli so I had to ride the 32km back to Diara Pont with a broken seat. It was quite uncomfortable but I had no other choice, (we didn't have the right size alan wrench to fit and tighten the part that loosened, so of course it was reasonable to ride 19miles, uckgh, mountain biking!). The following day I went to Salemata for the market and got it repaired. We then saw Katie in Salemata, only 5km away, rather than the farther distance we covered the day before. Ohhh Senegal.