I am going to start writing things down that make us think the phrase ‘TIA’. And I have a couple great stories to start out with. A couple days ago while I was helping Sibo (what everyone calls Mariama - host mom #2) water her garden beds, I heard some loud noises in this huge Red Silk Cotton tree right by the garden. I look over at it and there is a family of about 5 -7 little red monkeys hanging out! I stopped watering and ran over there and got to watch them for a good hour (they were also watching me)! They were very cute, climbing all over this huge tree, and one of them had a baby monkey on her stomach! As I was leaving to get my camera, our counterpart from the NGO KomFari arrived at the garden to talk to me so I couldn’t go get it but it was definitely a great ‘I live in Africa’ moment. I am sad Ben didn’t get to see it – he was working at the eco-camp that morning and by the time we got back to the garden, the monkeys had left.
There are a lot of TIA moments but I’ll just touch on one more. We are still eating with our family and yesterday, we had sting ray for lunch. Normally for lunch we have mashed up leaves on rice with some fish. See below...
This is what a normal lunch looks at on our site, and to be honest its not terrible. For the ingredients available in village, our moms do a great job making things. But this is where those care packages really are life savers, Thanks again so much!!! We both lost some weight during training so having protein bars, snacks, and the ability to cook has been a huge help to our health! While we really want to be like our community – eating and living the same way, we have come to realize that it may not be in the best interest of anyone for us to eat only Gambian food because if we are sick all the time, we are no help to anyone.
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