Walla walla ding ding:)

Hello everyone! First, Happy 4th o July! I will be missing hangen out & doing 4th stuff my with peeps. Second, I'm sorry I haven't written sooner. Its been two months & I'm sure you are wondering whats become of me. I'm very well and still enjoying The Gambia. Things have defiantly normalized for me in village (fetching water, growing my food, laundry by hand, the community based living, language, etc.) but now what is surprising me is what the new season brings.

April-May was prime mango season. I'm lucky to live in Kiang West because the surrounding bush is littered with mango trees. These trees swell & droop with their big nibblets. One of the daily sounds included the heavy drop of this big fruit which was followed by the running of children's feet. I ate about five mango's a day and they where delicious.

The big project Ive been working on these last months has been setting up a tree nursery at Dumbuto lower basic school. Gambia has been subjected to major deforestation in the last 20 years and the government/environmental agencies are trying to push tree planting. To help, The Gambia holds an Annual Nursery Tree Competition where nursery's are established on the school grounds and eventually the trees are out planted in the bush. This tree nursery competition have judges from the Forestry Service and a Peace Corps that go around and look at the number and quality of the nursery's. The winners (1st-3rd place) get tools for their school gardens. I will become a judge for my region next year.

Growing mango's, chews & mahogany. Grow baby grow.

This is a spot we call the g-spot (dubbed the girls spot). There friends and I go to watch the sunset when we are in kombo. I find the spot enchanting and the fact that no one is around is astonishing.

Chillen like villains.

So now its July and it is officially the rainy season. After not a drop o rain, it now rains on a regular basis. Then temperature has gone down about 10 degrees but its been replaced by 100% humidity at the peak of the day. Its really nice to have the rains come in and this weather reminds me a ton of Portland in Spring time. The thunder & lightning storms here, which roll through regularly, are amazing! These storms are nothing like I've ever seen back home, the big ones are actually really scary and intense, which if you know me well I totally dig on.
With the beginning of the rainy season comes the beginning of the farming season. If you want to eat here in The Gambia you have to grow it. The men grow coos and sorghum crops and the women grow the rice. In the morning and evening my village grows quiet because everyone is out in their fields. This will cont. until Dec or Jan. I myself have acquired a small plot out side the village where I will grow about a kg of rice seed. I'm excited to go out and work with the women, they are a hoot.

Its very hard work thou, no machine you can sit on and do the work for you, its all by hand.

My mother Jara prepping her rice plot. I love her, she is amazing.

Hello Green!!! Flowers and grasses are growing and the bush has become lush and beautiful. A big change from dry, brown, desolates of the dry season. This is a baboon that we named Booboo. She was rescued from a family a few villages down. Booboo was raised by her human "care givers" as a form of income to entertain people at the luumos or weekly markets. This is illegal here just like in the States but not really regulated. Booboo will dance and play dead for her food which is reactionary for her. Unfortunately she is very imprinted and releasing her back in the wild will be a great challenge.

She likes to make sure your clean. She will always sneak up behind me and start grooming me, a social and bonding behavior they do for each other. Its her way of telling me "I think your cool and we can hang".

With the rains come clouds, which give way to beautiful sunsets. This was taken from my back yard. However I'm scoping out a sunset picture taking spot.

I wish I had some amazing story to tell but things have been really good and the strangeness of Gambia has become quaint and predictable for me. What hasn't changed is the fact that I miss you all terribly. Your calls, letters and e-mails make my bouts of homesickness more bearable, thank you a thousand times over. I will make a better effort to post anything that you all might find interesting, even if its mainly photos (they speak a thousand words you know).

Big hugs from Africa, your Amber:)