Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming

I know that I've lapsed lately in my blog writing, but it's been a rather crazy month. There's been a lot of lows lately mixed in with the highs, and it starts to creep up on you. The weather situation has not helped either, for as the Senegalese like to say, "the heat has arrived", with most days averaging around 42C in the shade. It feels like living in a convection oven - even the wind is burning hot. The frequency and duration of power outages have also increased, and we now spend most of our days without power (and our nights without internet, due to a bizarre missing DNS address between 19 and 23 h). I had never passed out before in my life because of heat, yet it happens on a daily basis here. It's truly that hot.

Work never ends here - I'm off again tomorrow to a meeting in Fanaye (about 4 hours away by public transport) regarding a mural painting project I'm working on with a Peace Corps Volunteer, where we hope to train Tostan participants in how to create permanent visualizations of the human rights lessons they're learning. Images are already an extremly important part of the Tostan program, so we are hopeful that this will serve as a reminder of those lessons, even after the classes are over. It's one of my "baby" projects that I've started to keep me sane, as well as to keep me from being stuck writing "portraits" (donor "fluff" pieces) on various villages. I love visiting villages to see the work that takes place on the ground, as I'm very aware now of the challanges that they face, and which successes are "real" versus the exagerated ones that they think I want to hear. I love being able to include these experiences in my reports, to be able provide indepth details that highlight the realities of the region. I'd rather write a constructive, factual, accurate, report any day then a emotion-laced, "Oprah" style piece where I work to tug on the heart strings of donors by talking about the brave struggles of the women and poor malnourished, unclothed children running around. That is a damagin, misleading over-simplification of the problem, and it glosses over far too many elements. Development is about successes AND failures: it's about learning from your mistakes, correcting what went wrong, and continiously working to improve those things that went right. There is good work that is done on the ground, and it should be embraced, warts and all.

Sorry - that was my exhausted and somewhat nonsensical rant for the evening. There's been a lot of things pent up in my lately, and I'm working to excise these frustrations in the hopes of making Tostan a better organization by the time I leave, at the very least in the Fouta anyways. It's hard to believe how quickly the time has gone, and to realize that I've got just a little over 3 months left before I head back home to law school. Scary. Anyways, I'm completely exhausted and sweating buckets, so I think I'm going to hit the sack. I'll update when I get back again, inch'allah...