Happy Gamou!*

*Gamou is the name for the celebration of Mohamed's birthday, which is today.

First of all, I'm sorry that it's been so long since my last post. I'm getting bad at such things, mainly because I can't believe that we've already been here for five weeks. It's a little shocking.

For this post I again bring you a collection of odds and ends.

Language

The greetings in Wolof are kindof fun in translation.
- I pray for peace on your behalf.
- Peace for you, too.
- Are you here?
- I am here still.
- Are your house people (family) there?
- They are there.
- Thank you, God.
- Thank you, God.

We spent last weekend in a village in Futa, the region to the north east where they speak Puular. We had a crash course on Puular the Monday before, but I learned almost nothing. Not only was there a completely new set of weird words, there are consonants in Puular that are just about impossible for us to pronounce properly. It was really weird to come back to Dakar and actually be relieved to hear Wolof again. At least in Wolof I can do the basic greetings and say "Julia laa tudd."

Arthropods

There are a number of interesting arthropods here. For instance, there are at least three different kinds of ants. There are the normal-sized ones, but there are also the ones that are so tiny they are almost invisible, and this evening I just saw one that was about half an inch long. That was slightly disturbing to see crawling across the keyboard.

A couple weekends ago when we were in Toubab Dialao we saw a big, flat, six-legged, speckled sand-colored thing that I think might have been that relative of a scorpion that was in the picture book of dangerous creatures that we had when we were little. Whatever it was, it ran away and hid in a corner. We gave it a wide birth, but it didn't attack anyone. While we were there we also saw a praying mantis, which was cool because I don't think I'd seen one before, at least not in the wild.

I haven't noticed many spiders, though that could be simply because they're unremarkable to me. The exception is the one that I mentioned in a previous entry, the jumping spider. It was pretty cool, particularly since I know that it would have no reason at all to jump on me, except by accident. Kelly and Katie also found a spider on a web on the inside of one of their jambes (sp? it's a type of drum). Maybe it liked vibrations from the drumming.

Last weekend in Mboumba while we were waiting around for stuff to happen (that was a joke. We spent at least 75% of our waking hours waiting for something to happen) at one point, we were all sitting around singing pop songs (or mostly listening in my case. I don't know many pop songs) when Kelly exclaimed that she had seen a scorpion. None of us thought much of it, until someone explained to Gabi (our music... sometimes he teaches us) that a small scorpion had crawled under the mat he was sitting on. To everyone's surprise he jumped up and ripped aside the mat, and nearly shouted that it was not a small scorpion. He shouted to a nearby kid to get a shoe, and smashed the scorpion repeatedly with the flip-flop. It was about two inches long. I don't know enough about scorpions to know if he was over-reacting or not. Given everyone else's reaction, I suppose not. They would know more about how poisonous the local scorpions are than we do.

Names

We have all been given Senegalese names. Mine is Huja, or something like that. Whenever I say it people correct my pronunciation, so I'm not sure about that spelling. I have also decided to create an alternate identity to give to random people on the street if they ask me. If anyone asks, my name is Josephine Grant, and I have a fiancée/husband named James McCrimmon (If you get this reference, laugh hysterically, so that people stare at you as though you are insane. If no one else is around, go somewhere where there are people. If you don't get the reference, be one of the people that stares at me as though I am insane).