Emma's Visit: Part the Third

Fair and gentle readers,

Remember way back in January when Emma came to Senegal? Contrary to what you might have inferred from my infrequent blog posts, the trip did not end in Tambacounda. Emma did not, in fact, grow so frustrated by our long day of public transportation that she threw up her arms, rented a taxi to Dakar, and hopped on the first plane out of Senegal. No, Emma is made of stronger stuff than that. Just a day after arriving in Tamba, she gamely stepped onto a bus taking us all the way down to Kedougou. Masochistic? I'll let you decide.



I don't want to spend too long dwelling on the obvious, but Kedougou is not Linguere. For those who may have forgotten, may I point your attention to this post? Walking around Kedougou in the dry season feels a bit like walking through a forest in the fall. The trees are colorful, but somewhat bare, yet there's a whole world of life underfoot, beneath a thick layer of crunchy leaves.




In Kedougou we met up with David Campbell, of Universal Nut Sheller and Homemade Hut fame, as well as his dad, Brian, who is a clone of David, only slightly older and slightly taller.



I had to do a double-take at one point when Brian rounded a corner wearing David's iconic coral man purse.



All joking aside, it's always nice to meet other volunteers' parents when they come to visit. We know each each other in such a limited, but intimate, context that it's nice to get a brief glimpse into the lives from which we all came. Emma and I enjoyed spending a few days en famille with the Campbells. We biked to the market, where Emma and Brian picked out fabric, while I gave indelicate commentary. Really though, what is there to say about blue fabric with bright orange palm trees but, "It's fun"?



We ate maffe--rice and peanuty tomato (or tomatoey peanut) sauce--for lunch. There was a shortage of big person chairs.




We purchased the ingredients to make homemade pizza, and then had a pizza party at David's hut. Yes, in addition to building his own hut, David has built two pizza ovens. I have no explanation.






Then we took a short bike trip out to Segou, a village about 25 kilometers southeast of Kedougou near the Guinean border, which attracts visitors because of the nearby waterfall. Zach, the volunteer who lives there, recently wrote a Peace Corps Partnership grant to help the community build a campement--a small, cheap guest house--so we decided to stay the night to support the project.




All five of us took a lovely afternoon hike to the watefall, and briefly stopped to take a dip in a clear, chilly swimming hole.






We returned to the campement in the early evening. After we cleaned up, some women from the village served us a dinner of onion sauce over fonio--a nutritious, small-grain millet prevalent in Kedougou, but nowhere else in Senegal--which we ate sitting in a circle in the shell of the still-unfinished restaurant, with a perfect view of the dark night sky. The bush felt calm as we passed the hours before bedtime playing cards.

We returned to Kedougou the next day. Emma and I rode ahead of David and his ironman-in-training dad (there's got to be something in their water...). On our last day in Kedougou, Emma and I at lunch at the Hôtel Relais, which sits on the bank of the Gambia River.



That night, Emma and I took a ten-hour bus ride from Kedougou to Dakar, and spent the last day of her trip shopping for souvenirs in Dakar. Hopefully Emma enjoyed traversing the country during her two weeks in Senegal, and won't begrudge me too much my whip-cracking, cattle-driving style as a hostess. There are places to go, people to see, and things to do, you know. The world won't wait.