THE Website

Staying up until 4am to watch the Super Bowl while you have a cold is not a good idea. I was an absolute waste of life today. After sleeping in and procrastinating doing anything by reading the New York Times, it took me close to 5 hours to clean my room just because I could only pick up one thing before sitting down to blankly stare at something. Therefore, between 8am and 2pm I did nothing other than organize and clean my room.

It took every ounce of my energy and telling myself that I was lazy in order to leave my compound today and head off to Dioss' after lunch. I needed to give Dioss money from the Expo last week and I hadn't seen him in a while so I just needed to go and visit. None of the boy posse was around so we sat and chatted for a while. He's been very busy lately as well with the French NGO coming and supposedly sending the infamous magazine off to the printer. Dioss is very excited because the people from the French NGO were able to launch a website for AdapThies, the artist association in Thies of which Dioss is president. This is the link: www.art2thies.com The site is in French, but google should be able to translate it for you and the pictures are pretty cool to look at regardless. Dioss and I had a good chat and I attempted to plan some more ateliers with him, but he was distracted because a newspaper reporter was coming to interview him about the website. When the reporter came I left and walked back home.

Nothing too much is new at home. Deenba is officially not working for my family anymore. She decided that she wanted to live in her village where she is the oldest and therefore the most powerful sister instead of being bossed around all the time at my house, understandable. Therefore we've had a revolving door of neighborhood girls helping us since Jeenaba and Awa are totally overwhelmed. Mami also packed her bags today and is heading off to Dakar to start school again since her basketball days are apparently over and she doesn't want to get married. Mami leaving will have no bearing on the workload of the other girls since Mami is just about as helpful as I am with the house work and the cooking. What I am fantastic at is babysitter. Or at least I'm deemed competent enough to be left with Abdou. Jeenaba's most used phrase with me is "go greet Alyssa." This is a not so subtle hint that it is now my turn to take Abdou and at some point in the fairly distant future Jeenaba will come back to claim him. Jeenaba is a fantastic mom so I'm happy that I can take the baby off her hands for a little bit and hanging out with Abdou helped me feel like I wasn't a complete waste today.