Visiting Zogare

June 8^th

We had to move inside in the middle of the night because of a huge rainstorm that sprang up, so we woke up pretty tired for Dave's meeting this morning with the responsables of the village. Maurice went with him to MAP (Men As Partners, a Peace Corps training) and is now really excited to try and teach more people about gender equality! (awesome, right?) His first goal is to reduce pregnancies in the middle schools. Everyone was late because of the rain (including us, we made scrambled eggs with veggies) and half of the people didn't show up since they had gone out into their fields to plant while the ground was soft enough to dig in (a day under the sun and it's hard as a rock again). The whole thing was in Moore so I wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but they did seem to be having a lively discussion that ended favorably, with people at least agreeing to be on board with trying to reduce pregnancies among school-aged girls. And the best part was that Dave and I didn't have to do a thing, just sit there! That's how this is supposed to work, someone in the community taking initiative and the volunteer just helping and supporting (or showing up to a meeting so that people will want to come and stare at us).

Our duty done, we went to the marche and bought a wedding pagne to send to his friend who's getting married in the US next month, and went home and watched a movie, Waiting. We showered, read, talked, and napped for the afternoon, then Maurice invited us over to eat porc au feu (roasted pork) so we biked across the village to visit his family (and marvel at the goat that had somehow made it up to the roof of his house). We went home and made dinner while fending off the flying termites that we had watched hatch out of the ground this afternoon (they were so pretty and poetic then, now they're just annoying and try to fly into your headlamp), watched another movie (St. Tritian's 2 or something like that, very funny with Colin Firth and Rupert Evert), and now it's time for bed.