Work and Pleasure

I’ve had a pretty interesting past few weeks. I traveled to Senegal for a softball tournament for West African based ex-pats. My first bit of substantial development work was finished yesterday and another job is already in the pipeline.

WAIST (West African Invitation Softball Tournament) is a annual softball tournament put on by Senegalese based ex pats. Every year people come to Dakar for a weekend of fun and softball. However, the major thing I drew from my time in Senegal is how a “developed” West African country looks. At least in Dakar everyone spoke French fairly well (not the case in Mali). Multistory buildings were commonplace and there was even a mall. I felt like I stepped off a bus and entered some bizarre parallel Africa.

One other major difference was my inability to communicate to the people around me. My Bambara is to the point where I can carry on a decent conversation with pretty much anyone on the streets. Things like asking for directions and trying to figure out how much stuff cost is super simple. In Senegal the native language is Wolof, not Bambara, and whatever French I learned during my one semester of French has atrophied in village. As a result the entire experience felt like amateur hour. Since I was a little kid, I’ve never had to rely on other people as much as I relied on my French speaking friends while I was in Senegal. Before I travel out of Mali again I am defiantly going to brush up on my French.

One last endorsement, Senegal has some amazing beaches. If that is what your looking for and aren’t against going to Africa you won’t be disappointed.

As soon as I got back to village, I had to put the finishing touches to a shea butter formation that I put on in village. There were a few headaches, mostly caused my vacation, but come time for the formation to actually start the entire thing went off without a hitch. The shea tree is only found in Mali and the countries immediately surrounding Mali. The butter obtained from it’s nuts is used in skin care products. The formation that I put on, with considerable help from a shea cooperative in San, showed the how to produce high quality oil.

Now my host dad wants me to work on putting on a formation for the local cereal bank.