Village Stay

I have just completed my two week village stay! Of course I took a fair number of photos, but sadly I'm not in many of them. Funny how that works. At any rate, I have uploaded a vast majority of them to the usual purgatory, my dropbox account. You can browse them at your leisure here. They will not, however, have any colorful commentary. Therefore I have chosen a selection of particularly interesting pictures to launch what will probably become multiple blog posts about my experiences in the village. On y va!

 This is the "Baobob" quartier of town. It is entirely made up of one family (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) This is where I lived for two weeks. It is beautifully green right now because we are in the rainy season.  All around the town are fields, though between the hill from which I took the picture and the town it is mainly pasture land. You can see the church. Nearly the entire family is Catholic. However, a majority of the town is Muslim so there is a mosque just across from the church (behind some other buildings there so you can't see it).

It is hard to explain where these buildings are in the first picture, but at any rate I slept in the room with the open door farthest to the right. It is the room of the man who was hosting me. He slept with his younger brother while I was there. To the left, with the door closed, is the room of another of his brothers. That brother is currently in the capital but his wife lives there with their baby daughter. To the left of that, mostly hidden behind the tree, is the hut of the mother and father of the family. Behind that is turkish toilet/shower, which you really can't see. And the building on the left is where the cooking is done. There is also a water reservoir in there. Each morning the girls bring the water up to the reservoir from the one tap in the quartier. Fortunately it is only about 150 yards away.

 Here is the tap for the quartier. From here the girls bring the water to different reservoirs (one for each family).

The bigger the girl, the bigger the bucket. I caught RC just as some of the water splashed into her eyes. I must have distracted her too much!

While we are on the subject of RC, here is what she looks like when she isn't carrying a bucket of water or trying to terrorize you. It took her a little while to get used to me, but once she did she followed me everywhere I went. She and J became my permanent shadows.

I never did get a good picture of J. Here he is being carried by his uncle N. N is the life of the party, always ready to start singing and dancing. He loves all of the songs from church and will often start singing them alone until others join in. Part way through my stay a friend loaned me his guitar. From that point on N was constantly asking me to take it out and play.

I did play fairly often. I think I got quite a bit better at playing by ear, particularly in the key of D. I realized most hymns are written in the key of D and you can fake them with just the G, A, and D chords, tossing in an F#m if it sounds high or a Bm if that doesn't work.
There were also some other musicians who wandered through once they heard that there was a guitar in town. They provided several evenings of entertainment.

I also used the guitar at a little gathering that was held each Sunday evening under a tree in the village. My friend A (on the drum) is the one who hosted me. The guy to my right is his younger brother G and the guy on the far right side of the picture is their cousin E.

 Here are some more folks at the gathering.

And a carpet load of kids!

We even did a little dancing!

And that's all for now, it is half an hour past my bedtime. My next post will probably focus on how I spent my time while in the village.

p.s. It would really be a shame to not include a picture of the bathroom. This is the neighbor's, which is pretty much identical. A "Turkish toilet" is a porcelain hole in the ground. Once you get the squat down it works pretty well. Because there is no running water, these are also pit toilets. They do a good job of ventilation so it normally isn't too bad, a good thing since it also serves as the shower room. You fill a pail with water and then bath in the little space between the toilet and the door. A drain hole in the corner allows the water to drain off outside the room.