Life is Great... When You're 3

Dioss is in a period of artistic exploration. His words not mine. Although when I went to his gallery today he did have some new abstract pieces that were pretty amazing. He's experimenting with making the paint watery and then picking up the paper and moving it around. The paintings are cool and very surreal looking. There are some others that are Jackson Pollack-esque. While Dioss is pumped about his new art, he is not quite as enthusiastic about accounting. Can you blame him? I pretty much had to resort to threatening and told him I would help him make a website until we get his finances in order. He literally writes nothing down. I told him we have a lot of work to do to which he replied that he thought we could fix all the prices on Monday when we meet again. Please help me! I see disaster ahead. I know Dioss is smart and able and he is a great artist, but I do not have a good feeling about our foray into finance. I wish he had a good business partner that I could work with because Dioss is not interested in the money side of things... this should be interesting.

After going to the post office where I got a letter (thanks Leigh! More on this later), I headed over to my typing class. My girls were just sitting down, the computers were just booting up, and then we lost power. Luckily, I always have at least one magazine in my bag at all times so I pulled that out as we waited for the power to come back on. Senegalese people have amazing patience and none of the women were at all upset and surprisingly neither was I. We all had something to read and we chatted and some little kids came in and out, but the power didn't come back on. When an hour had passed we called it a day. No class. This wasn't so much frustrating as disappointing. These women are motivated and want to learn and actually showed up and then a force completely out of their control makes it impossible. There are just so many obstacles to getting anything done here. The lack of infrastructure makes everything so difficult. Senegal is only the size of South Dakota and it takes 14+ hours to get from Thies to the southeastern region of Kadagou and Thies is centrally located. When I got back home the power was on, but we lost it for another 2.5 hours as my sisters were trying to cook dinner. Needless to say they are obsessed with my headlamp for power-less cooking.

Back to Leigh's letter... other than being amazing and a great pick-me-up, it contained a personalized paper menorah and some pictures. And these just weren't normal pictures, they were pictures of snow! Little Ahmed and I are quickly becoming BFF. He has infinite patience for me and I'm the only person that will play with him. My best friend in Senegal is 3. I just wanted to put that out there and now moving on. I showed him the pictures and asked him what the white stuff was. He knew that it was snow, but when I asked him what he would wear if he came to my house in the snow he said shorts... but, with a long sleeve shirt. I really filled my day today by playing with Ahmed and playing with children isn't my strong suit.

Khady came back from Dakar yesterday and I think she brought some toys because yesterday we played with the white board and letters and today we had a cooking set. I asked Ahmed to make me some eggs and then I pretended to eat them, which he thought was crazy and he asked me why I was pretending to eat food that wasn't there. OK, I guess we don't play pretend with food here in Africa... I felt a little stupid. He quickly left the majority of the kitchen set for the two knives which we pretended to kill each other with. I guess death games unlike food games are universal. After knife fights we moved onto prokadima. I've had the game for a month and we play all the time and his all time high consecutive hits is 2. I guess this is the downside of your BFF being 3.