I am still alive and about to finish my Rotary World Peace Fellowship

Unfortunately, I did not keep up with the blog as much as I wanted to during my time in Senegal. Thus, true to form, I am going to give a brief overview of the last, oh, two and half months.

After writing my last posting about inspiration, I continued to push forward with rallying support for the Maids Project with some positive results. In the end, a new organization, 10,000 Girls, has agreed to take on the project and implement it as a pilot project of the self-sustainable model that it uses in its major programs in Fatick and Kaolack, Senegal. Basically, the idea is, in addition to providing literacy, basic education, and reproductive health education, to offer vocational skills training and micro-enterprise opportunities to the girls and young women in such a way that they gain the knowledge and abilities needed to manage the project themselves and earn at least some of the funds necessary to keep in running. 10,000 Girls has already done this in Fatick and Kaolack and is internationally recognized for this approach which genuinely engages the beneficiaries as partners.

Having this organization on-board as the managing agency is important to our chances of winning a nearly $260,000 grant from the Human Network Senegal, a partnership program of the Japanese Agency for International Cooperation (JICA). I spent a solid week adapting the general project plan that I devised to meet the criteria of the JICA Request for Proposal. I think that the final product is solid and that we have an excellent shot at receiving the funds. We will know by mid-October.

Besides work I have done some travelling within Senegal and in Mali with a wonderful friend from Portland, Donna. The Senegal travels include my trip to St. Louis, the previous capital of Senegal, and the National Park Langue de Barbarie. I also visited the "Pink Lake", which gets its name from the color that it takes on when the sun hits it due to the high salt content. The local Senegalese extract the salt from its bottom for sale.

Mali was amazing and a true adventure. Think amazing people who sincerely wanted to help us out and share a little bit of their lives with us. Think travelling up the Niger River for three days on a cargo boat to Tomboutou (Timbuktu) and risking our lives to climb out the side of the boat and traverse the 1 inch ledge to the back of the boat every time we wanted to go to the bathroom. Think sleeping on grain sacks and eating a strange gruel with an unsure source of its rather unpleasant taste. Think delicious street beignets, lamb kabobs, fried plantains, pounded millet with sauce made from the Baobab tree…hmmm. Think trekking up and down through the escarpment now inhabited by the Dogon people and seeing some the most beautiful scenery: vast plains, waterfalls, fields of millet, brilliant red rock formations. Thinking riding a camel into the Sahara to watch the sunset in Timboutou. In short, it was an unforgettable trip. This is fortunate given my camera quit working after the second day. :-(

I now have only a few days left in Senegal as an official Rotary World Peace Fellow. Earlier today I submitted my final Rotary report, signaling an end to this particular stage in my life. Today I will say my farewells to my host family and tomorrow my friends at the beach are having a little good-bye get-together for me. Believe it or not some cooler weather and non-beach weekend activities are welcome at this point (yes…even the “beach professional”, as my dear friend Scott has coined me, needs a break from the sand and surf once in a while). ha ha

Thursday night I am off to Europe to travel around Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and I don’t know where else until November 5. Then in November I will return to Argentina for about a month before returning to Oregon for the holidays in December. After that, my plans are somewhat up in the air. Music pursuit is a possibility, but a job with a steady salary also is appealing (and well frankly really necessary…let me know if you hear of anything of interest particularly in Portland! ;-)

That’s all for now….

P.S. Pictures are from my trip to St. Louis, the National Park Langue de Barbarie, and the "Pink Lake" in Senegal