It's Almost Too Hot to Think Straight ... That's our excuse

We spent the day in the desert, looking for water (under the ground).

There are several projects underway here in Senegal with Andando, and several more on the way, and we spent the day driving to distant locations, getting things lined out. 

The weather here is brutal right now, with temperatures up to 106 degrees F, and hot direct sun beating down.  So even with air conditioning in the truck, it's sometimes hard to concentrate, all you can think of is finding some shade and cold water!

We went to many sites and I will list them by their Senegalese name:  Sama Toucouleur, Daga Sombou, Ndioufene, Keur Nene Serere, and Taiba Nianguene.   A couple of them are just now functioning and the others are new projects where we have to dig a well.

One of the future well and garden spots in the middle of the desert

The well digging (by hand) is not for the faint of heart.  The guys are lowered by a rope down the well, sometimes 75 feet deep.  It's hot and dirty work, and they can only work for an hour or so, then they have to trade out to a new guy. 

 

This picture above shows one of the well diggers after he has come up from the bottom of the shaft.  He is covered in the wet clay-like dirt at the base.  

Funny story 

So we are doing a little work at the base house here in Keur Soce, just some cleaning and decorating.  One of the new wall hangings requires a long pole to mount it on the wall.  Of course a long straight stick is hard to come by in these parts.

 

So we go to the hardware store to buy a couple things, and ask about the "curtain rod" that we need for the wall.  They have no idea what we're talking about and we have to explain several times what we want.  Bamboo would be ideal, but there isn't any around here.  

We're ready to give up but on our way out, we see a long stick.  It has a funky mop top sort of thing on top, and we ask about it.  They laugh and say it's a kind of a feather duster thing that they use to clean the dust from the ceiling.  We say "this is perfect and, can we buy it?"

They think this is hilarious.  But we say "Hey, no, we are serious, we will buy this and take the feather duster thing off"  and it will be the perfect size for our wall hanging.  They think we are completely nuts.  

We ask - how much?  They are baffled and say it's not really for sale and they bought it from some street vendor who stopped in and pointed out how dirty their ceiling was.  

So we negotiated.  At one point they protested, "How are we going to clean our ceiling?"  And we all looked up and saw the ceiling was pretty dirty and had not been cleaned in a ... (I don't want to be unkind here) ... forever?

They laughed - and agreed!  So we made a deal, and we can't wait to get home tonight and add to the decor of the house!  It's gonna be awesome.

We can always blame it on too much time in the hot sun ...