The Easter Holidays

Having only been working here for about two weeks, it came as a bit of a surprise to get a holiday so quickly. But yes, last week the Easter holidays began and work finished. Instead of just hanging around in St. Louis for a week, fourteen of us decided to make good use of their time by heading down to the far South of the country and seeing the sights.

School finished on Friday the 27th of March, and we left the same evening in two 'sept-places' - large estate cars which serve as long-distance taxis here. We were headed for Kédougou, 1000km or so south of St. Louis. We got there without too many major problems - only one car crash and a burst tire, and everything was fine(apart from the fact that we were seven passengers and a driver squashed into a sept-place for twelve hours).

As we travelled around Bassari country we stayed mostly in little villages and campements, sleeping in mud huts or under the stars. During the daytime we travelled around taking in the countryside from the back of two 4x4s, and walking in the hills. The landscape really is beautiful, and very different from St. Louis. Despite the heat, the region is very forested and green. The hilly landscape also made a welcome change from the slightly monotonous flatness of the North! One of the highlights of the trip was hiking to a Christian-animist village, isolated far away from any town. The people were very friendly and the village was amazing, but it was quite a surreal experience. It felt like we had stepped back in time several hundred years at least. They did have a school and a medical centre (no medicine though) but the most sophisticated technology I saw there was probably the single blackboard.

Towards the end of our trip we visited a large (over 100m) waterfall and went swimming in the pool below it. Most of the time that we were in Bassari the temperature was over 40 degrees. Our bottled water usually ended up about the temperature of freshly made tea, and real showers didn't seem to exist - so showering in a cold waterfall and then jumping into the pool was really...unimaginably wonderful. It was also one of the most beautiful places that I've ever been. The memory of it stayed with me for all the uncomfortable hours of the car ride back to St. Louis, via Dakar. This time it was the other sept-place that crashed, so the journey was marginally better than before.

We got back into town on Friday, since when I've been slowly recovering. School restarts next Monday, so I'm currently working on a small renovation project. A team of volunteers is helping to repaint a red cross centre in a slightly unsavoury shade of pink. Once that's finished we're set to move onto the renovation of a Talibé (street children) centre, so we're certainly keeping busy!