To maintain sanity, it’s important to occasionally take your routine and, as it slowly hardens into a fixed and immutably rigid structure, strike it with a blow of sufficient force to shatter it to pieces. This isn’t to say you should throw away what you have and start over from scratch (although that is always an option), but rather that you should “mix things up” every now and again, allowing those component pieces to reallocate themselves into a different and perhaps more interesting configuration. Variety is the spice of life.
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Well, not really break, more like time-when-I’ll-work-but-not-so-much-at-school. But it’s a break from school, so the next two months are hereby christened “Break.” Amin.

So yeah, school’s wrapping up, got one more week of classes (this week), and then exams for the next two weeks, and that’s it! My students will have their exam for my class next Monday, so really I’ll finish up next Monday, inshallah. I really can’t wait for it, ’cause my students are mostly mentally already on break, as am I, so this week is definitely going to drag and fly by all at the same time. Isn’t it funny how time can do that? It’s really good, though, that school will finish up so soon, as my NPCS project needs my attention more and more these days, and I want to spend more and more time on it these days, so it’s really a win-win situation.
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This last week was my education group’s first Inter Service Training, or IST. It took place very close to my home, which is nice - it could have been anywhere in The Gambia, and it just so happens that admin decided on this place that’s just quite literally a stone’s throw from my front door. I mean, I could really chuck a rock from my house and break one of their windows. That close. Pretty convenient.

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Where’ve I been, you ask? It’s been weeks since my last post, I’ve been slow to respond with emails - I mean heck, it’s almost like I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, so to speak. Well, that obviously hasn’t happened, but what has happened is that I’ve dived head-first into a multi-week coding binge from which I’ve still yet to surface for anything more than a brief moment to get a breath of air, and then I’m back at it.
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So, last week was a break between the second and third terms for all of us teaching here in The Gambia, and I decided - late Saturday night, as it were - to go traveling upcountry to Basse for a week, leaving early Monday morning.
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I think I’ve recently, just in the last few days, really discovered some of the “romance” I’ve been hoping to find in an exotic far-away locale through my Peace Corps experience. For months, I’ve been dealing with much of the frustrations with moving into a new place and getting settled, so I see it as something of an important milestone to find myself really just finding myself in awe at so much simple beauty around me.

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So, last weekend I went up to Dakar, Senegal for the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. About 30 PCVs went up from The Gambia, with many more from Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania. Three types of people went: those playing competitively, those playing non-competitively, and those going just for the heck of it. I was solidly in the non-competitive arena, in large part because I suck at softball. Haven’t played since little league, and I wasn’t all that into it then either. But it’s fun, and it breaks the ice, so why not?
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Okay… some people have expressed an interest in getting some updated pictures of me without my PC-training-acquired scruffage. So, here’s a couple shots. The close-up isn’t so great (perhaps part of is that I take a lot of these sorts of close-ups and , but I really like the zoomed-out version.

So, just a quick update. Sorry I haven’t written too much recently, things have been really busy. Here’s the low-down on what’s going on in crazy dusty sand-covered voltage-regulating fish-head-friendly Mattland:

Firstly, I’m not getting a bike. I can understand why, really. To begin, there aren’t any trauma centers here in The Gambia, so if I were hit by a car or got in an accident then I’d be really screwed. And second, if I got a bike, every other volunteer in Kombo would start screaming for their own, too. That would open a huge can of worms that, if I were in my CD’s shoes, I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole.
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I woke up on the morning of Tabaski wondering what time it was. The previous night, Sainey had told me that he’d come by in the morning to gather me for the prayer, something I had shown an interest in attending. I knew it would be early, but didn’t know at what time precisely - not as if the precise time as you would find on a clock really matters around here: while people have watches, few adhere to them with the servitude most Americans would find compulsory. Time here you can tell by the sun: it is morning, afternoon, evening, or night.
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