"The · darkest · thing · about · Africa · has · always · been · our · ignorance · of · it"

So, now that the secret's out, I can officially tell you that the other thing I'll be doing while back in the U.S. is catching up with my brother and his FIANCEE!! That's right, I said fiancee--Stephen proposed to Chelsea Easter morning. Ask him for more details!

Sometimes, when my three-year-old host sister, Safi (who speaks four words of English) and I are play-fighting, she'll hold up her fists and yell, "Baby Police!"

I'm reasonably certain no one taught her this.

Best I can tell, she picked up the "Police!" line from some bad Nigerian film my host family watched on their DVD player (yes, they can't afford meat or electricity but they have a DVD player) at some point, then paired it with the only other English word she knew that made reasonable sense with it. (The other two words she knows being "goal" and "bye-bye.")

In other news, this week brings some sad news. Dan, unofficial chaperone of the URR, is on his way out. He is COSing (Close of Service) and leaves the country on April 10th. I said goodbye to him in Basse last week (though he might be up here one more time, not sure), and realized this was the first time a volunteer I was close to has left. (With as many volunteers as we have in-country, you can be "friends" with lots of people without ever getting to really know more than a few of them.) Anyway, it's a big loss for those of us who've come to count on Dan keeping things (and people) in order around here, so we're gonna miss him.

Hence, I give you my memory lane tribute to Dan:

Going to church in Kombo. Moringa. Chuck Norris. Training village moringa cooking. "It tastes like death!" Gele trips to Kombo. Ligge jotna Gambia amna bopam, bopam! (Mmmkay I speak Mandinka, not Wolof, don't blame me for any errors.) Ice cream and burgers at Foday's, the best part of site visit. Swear-in food. Biking to Basse with Amanda. "Nature." Rice at Aminata's for 15d. Daring Chris to eat the whole hot pepper. Wandering Mansajang asking for a puppy. You and Chris convincing me to pass over the healthier looking, blandly colored puppies for the crazily spotted, corkscrew tailed runt, because the little one was "cuter" and "wouldn't survive" without me after being thrown out at four weeks old. (Minty still owes you guys for that one, and never did reach full size.) Pasta sides. Meeting Chinese at the T*** office and having to listen to him go on and on about the amazing Baba Damfa. You and Kellie doing mailrun. Mailrun rants. Rice at Aminata's for 20d. Convincing me to ditch Traditions and be social for Christmas. The slaughterfest. Turducken and salad in a bucket. Gold, frankincense and myrrh from you and Cer. The Basse house and all its grunginess. Taking the newbies to church in Kombo. Smallville. The twenty banana challenge. Chiquita. Aquadan. The manpurse. Willy (and his Eyeore voice--is that even how you spell Eyeore?). Bear's crazy voice. Picnics on the hill. The Dan Niebler Ecotourism Lodge. Having the dogs watch out for hyenas and baboons. The freedom party. "Remember that time we had a freedom party, and it was awesome?" Harassing Chris about how we never see him. Rice at Aminata's for 25d. Deciding we can no longer afford to eat at Aminata's. Easter eggs that mostly didn't work out. "Black Beauty," pretty much the most awesome cartoon ever. "Laser" fights with warped baseball bats. Aquadan's floral print cape. And did I mention moringa?

In other news, I'm coming home! (But not for good, yet.) I'm escaping the Gambia in the most miserably hot month of the year, flying home April 25th and returning May 21st. That puts me home to celebrate my brother's 20th birthday and Mother's Day. Just to warn you, though, don't expect some sort of victorious return. I fully intend on arriving prodigal son-style, dirty (it takes a few days of hot showers to fully eradicate Gambian dirt) and broke (mmmkay my living allowance doesn't exactly allow me to establish a nest egg--and I'm not allowed to touch my resettlement allowance til I finish Peace Corps).

I've been spending my free time daydreaming about various ways to pass my time at home (remember that you all will have jobs and real lives going on, whereas I will not). I had the brilliant idea for a contribution for our graffiti bathroom (for those who haven't seen it, one of our bathrooms back home is covered with the doodles and scribbles of everyone who visits our house). I had the idea that I'd use one of the permanent markers and write labels on the walls for everything in the bathroom... Then a horrible realization struck me.

Sink? Toilet? Lightbulb? Shower? THESE ARE NOT WORDS I KNOW IN MANDINKA. (I can however, tell you the words for latrine, backyard and bucket in a heartbeat.) I would even venture a guess that if there ARE words for these things in Mandinka, they adopt the typical form Mandinka uses for items that were introduced by the white man:

take the white man's name for it and add "oo" (pronounced "oh").

Bookoo (book). Offisoo (office). Meetingoo (meeting). Ergo, I envision the words being sinkoo, showeroo, and toiletoo, which would really just be too much work to explain the first time someone comes over and sees we've labeled everything in the bathroom "____oo".

Sigh.

Lately, I've been biking around to different villages to visit other volunteers and future volunteers' sites. (I clocked 90km last week

alone.) On one of these outings, Tamara and I stopped at a turn to wait for Cer to catch up. While waiting, I chatted up a nice old guy to try to find out if there was any place nearby I could buy a bean sandwich. Alas, no. However, after that whole conversation wrapped up, another old (but NOT blind) guy called out to me, in all

seriousness: "Hey, are you a man or a woman?" I, wearing pants (my biking attire but not common women's clothing), understood a little of his confusion, but was offended by the rudeness of the question (he didn't even greet first, a major Gambian no-no), so I answered with a gruff, "Woman!" He responded, "I want to marry you!" Too frustrated by the double insult to explain to the man the irony of his request (there's nothing like my 15th marriage proposal of the day to set me off), Tamara and I found somewhere ELSE to wait for Cer.

In case I don't get another post up in time, Happy (early) Easter!

Remember my recipe contest from early December? Well the winner, by virtue of being the only entrant, is Julie Cleveland! (But late entries are still welcome.)

This month's mail day was Sunday. Definitely feeling the post-Christmas lag. It was a pretty sad mail day, all around (plus the volunteers during mail run were unusually grumpy). Maybe it's time for a new list of possible topics to write about?

- Pick a hot-button presidential campaign issue and tell me your views on it. Everyone in the US is tired of talking politics, so I'm your best shot at a good listener!

- Find the most crazy or funny news story you can, cut it out, and send it to me.

- Update me on pop culture! Pick your favorite new TV show and send me a synopsis. Or google the lyrics to your favorite new song, print them out, and tell me why you like it.

Finally, a leftover story from Kombo:

The last night I was there (before heading back to site), it happened that nearly all the women from my training group were in town (getting ready to travel to Senegal for the softball tournament). We made plans to go to dinner together at a nice restaurant in Senegambia, the tourist area. It turned out that the restaurant had an almost identical menu to another Senegambia restaurant (Paradiso's) I'd been to with Mom and Dad, so rather than skimp on pizza (the cheapest item), I decided to go for the "Macaroni Quatro," which I'd ordered at Paradiso's and loved. (Pasta with four types of cheese? Mmmkay I only ever get to eat real cheese every few months. Four cheeses was definitely worth the $10, a huge splurge on my budget.) When it came out, there was no sign of the huge piles of cheese that Paradiso's macaroni quatro had had, but I dove in anyway. It was not bad, but certainly not worth $10. I thought maybe the cheese was hidden deeper somewhere in the dish? But after eating deeper down into the bowl, I had a few other volunteers taste it. We agreed that this was definitely a cream sauce on my pasta, not cheesy goodness. We called the waiter over and explained the situation, that we were pretty sure there was no sign of four cheeses in this pasta. Now admittedly, it'd taken me a while to come to that definitive conclusion, so he asked why we hadn't told him right away, rather than continue eating. I explained that I'd thought the cheese was deeper down, and had only just then realized there was no cheese to be found. So he took my plate back to the kitchen to sort things out. Figured things'd be simple from there.

Wrong.

After a bit, the waiter comes back (sans pasta) and puts a small plate down in front of me. On the plate is a large mound of white stuff with dark flecks. I took it momentarily to be a half-scoop of chocolate chip ice cream, some sort of half-hearted apology. But further inspection proved me wrong, just as the waiter started trying to explain to me that the lump in front of me is the type of cheese that was in the pasta. I am at a total loss of what to do here or why on earth there is now a large globular hunk of cheese in front of me instead of what I ordered, and can barely hold in the laughter, much less make eye contact with the waiter, who began getting agitated and asking why I was ignoring him. This is where I was fortunate to not be eating alone, because I am no cheese expert. At that point, Tracey interjected and began explaining to the waiter that the chunk in front of me was clearly blue (bleu?) cheese (several volunteers even tasted to verify it) and that she'd tasted my pasta and there was CLEARLY no blue cheese in that sauce, and besides, it's supposed to be a FOUR cheese pasta anyway, so where were the other three cheeses, and what happened to my pasta anyway? So after going around and around in circles on this point for a while ("but that's cheese!" "but that's only one cheese, and it's not even in the pasta"), the waiter started violently protesting, "what do you want me to do??" Upon realizing that nothing was going to come of this, someone requests the manager, so the waiter goes back to the kitchen. He comes back and says (I swear I am not making this up), "the manager is not coming."

Tracey jumps in again, "are you saying the manager is not in the building, or that he is in the building but just isn't coming here?"

Waiter (firmly): "The manager is not coming to your table."

*Utter hysterical laughter breaks out at our table.* Waiter begins again with, "well what do you want me to do?" So Rachel (a rather intimidating presence when she gets serious on you) finally says, "okay, here's the deal. We are not paying for that pasta. Since you won't bring the manager, we'll just have to deal with you. You have two options. You can refuse to do anything for us, in which case we'll all walk out and not pay and I have a feeling your manager won't be happy with that, or you can take her dish off the bill, and the rest of us will pay for our food. Okay? So which will it be?" The waiter gladly picks the second option and we finally realize that he had been asking us what he should do, not to be stubborn, but because he genuinely had no clue what to do. The rest of the meal is spent laughing about the whole situation, saying over and over again "the manager is NOT coming to your table", and poking at the large hunk of blue cheese which the waiter never did remove from in front of me.  (The cheese connoisseurs at my table tell me that was a very expensively sized chunk of blue cheese brought out for demonstration.) In the end, I stuck it in a bag to take back with me. Tracey laid out "the rest of the story," as imagined by her (but totally feasible in this country): "Here's what really happened. The chef is our waiter's brother. Now, he totally messed up your pasta, but the waiter doesn't want to get him in trouble, so he won't go to the manager, which is why he was so agitated trying to work this out. So he's just going to go erase it from the bill and pretend the whole thing never happened, since his brother the chef has been messing up a lot lately, and this is his last shot."

After our pasta showdown, the waiter was noticeably absent from our table, which made getting our bill difficult. Rachel handled it, by asking first one waiter, then another, to either find our waiter or bring us the bill. After going through two waiters besides our own, all of whom disappear, she finally finds our waiter again, asks for our bill, then follows him back and stands at the entrance to the kitchen, so that no one else can possibly exit without delivering our bill. When a couple guys at the bar stare at her quizzically for standing there, she breaks out in a dance (I don't remember there being any music), which of course causes more hysterical laughter at our table. But she got us our check, my pasta was free, and we escaped with a pocketed hunk of blue cheese.