Saturday, November 24, 2007

Thanksgiving

This is going to be a quick update, because I have limited time here at the internet cafe, and, well, I'm lazy.

I'm currently sitting in Koutiala, having returned from three days and three nights spent hanging out with other volunteers in Sikasso ville for Thanksgiving. I've been traveling all week. On Tuesday all of the Koutiala area volunteers met in Koutiala to spend the night making hamburgers and hanging around with Sadio, our local Bambara tutor/Malian buddy, and his roommate Dolo. The next day, we headed to Sikasso, where we spent Wednesday making more than ten apple and pumpkin pies for the sixty or so people who came into the city from around the country. Thanksgiving day itself I spent hanging out with people and eating copious amounts of food. Sounds a lot like an American Thanksgiving, huh? Yesterday was Mexican night. All the volunteers went over to Katie's house and ate a meal of tacos on the roof of her apartment building. Nice.

Hm, sorry for the somewhat mechanical sounding update. Things are generally going pretty well at site, though I've been gone a fair amount in the past week or so. Came up here last week for Bambara tutoring, and now have been gone since Tuesday for Thanksgiving festivities. However, I feel like I'm settling in a bit more, getting to know more people and so on. I had all the ladies from the women's organization over to my house for tea two Mondays ago- was pretty successful. Have some photos of it that I'm working on getting up online. They will be available here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2018089&l=aedc2&id=10301328

soon.

In other news, the new Hunger Report, which I was working on last year at Bread for the World, is up online. Check it out here:

http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-reports/hunger-report-2008-download.html

I wrote the initial draft for Chapter 3, and there's an artical I wrote on a Milwaukee-area NGO in there as well.

That's it for now! Will write again later.