Hello friends! It’s been awhile! This post is in honor of Father’s Day. I figured since I posted on Mother’s Day as a gift to my mom, it was only fair to do the same for my dad! He was bummed when I sent him pictures yesterday of my guava picking hike and sent zero photos of my face, so prepare yourself for way more pictures of myself in this post than I am comfortable with. My last post was about the beekeeping training, and since then I’ve had several meetings with the apiculture group in my village, getting them on track for the hive installations. Power has been off for pretty much the past 3 months, other than a few days here and there, and the group has been having issues making the metal supports for the hives without electricity. So, my counterpart, Hady, decided to just go ahead and install the hives in trees for the interim.

I visited Fanning in her village for Easter, and went to a morning church service. There was a lot of singing and dancing.

 

We then went to Dorien’s house (she’s our friend that makes grilled fish for us on market day!).

 

After the guys left (I think the hair styling had something to do with that) we had fun doing a bit of dress up and dancing!

More recently, I visited Fanning and Casey again for Eid Mubarak, the party at the end of Ramadan. While I didn’t fast during the month of May, I did start using an app to count my calories that was recommended to me by a fellow volunteer that uses it to make sure she’s getting the right nutrients. While I haven’t lost much weight using it (not having the luxury of lots of vegetables and having to eat a fair amount of bread/rice/pasta) I have noticed it has changed my relationship with food and I feel leaner and healthier! I definitely make more conscious decisions about meals now, based on what I need to fuel my body, and less what I want and is easiest (mac and cheese, always). It’s also forced me to get creative with my recipes! Wish I had used it sooner in my service. So, while I hadn’t been fasting, I had definitely been depriving myself of junk food and empty calories for a month, so when Fanning made chocolate cake balls for the celebration, I may have eaten my weight in them.

 

Later that night, Fanning made the amazing cake balls and then we feasted on this meat sauce with noodles that she slow cooked for hours. It was AMAZING.

Just days later, there was another party, this time in my village! It was in honor of the return of power to my chef de village, after his younger brother had temporary power during the regular chef’s absence.

After that party I was all partied out, and it was a relief to get some work done.

I also got to finally visit the orphanage where my fellow volunteer Ella worked in Ngaoundéré, right before she left for the states to go to veterinary school! I brought my projector so the kids could watch Hidden Figures, and this little one spent most of the movie crawling all over me.

The last big event was my project manager visit to my site! She met with my counterpart and the twins insisted that we all drive out to see the hives, where she took our photo. It was great to see how proud they were of their achievements!

Now, to wrap up this post, here are some pictures from my guava picking adventures yesterday! It’s my new favorite pastime, as the groves are right next to the hives and allow me to check on the bees and collect fruit at the same time! Win-Win!

I leave you with another beautiful picture of the sunset over the lake, facing my home. The next post will be all about Camp LEAD, the 3 day camp for kids that we are holding first in my village (the 28th-30th) then in Casey and Fanning’s village the following weekend, and finally in Krista’s village the weekend after that! It’ll be a crazy 3 weeks, but we’ll have each other to help out! It’s a great opportunity to be able to hold such a large scale training for students on health, agriculture, and other important topics, and wouldn’t be possible with just one volunteer, so we are really lucky to be close enough to each other to make this happen!

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

(P.S. Enough pictures of me, dad?)