Staff Party at Tamesna

Since my first trip out to Tamesna I have gone through such internet frustration that I cannot even begin to describe since it would take me as long to describe as it took me to solve–about a week.  One day it took me four hours to upload one of the new students photos to the site–at that rate it would take me just over a week of working 24 hrs a day to put in all the kids photos from this year.   After that the site just wouldn’t open.  Thanks to Carleigh Rochon our website angel, it is now working.  She can’t fix the speed but…   I just have to explain some the frustrations of working here that you might not expect.  Fires in the market, bandits, terrorists, cultural misunderstandings, flat tires, broken down cars, broken windshields, electrical power cuts, water outages, sand storms, no paved roads, rebellions, droughts, floods, political coups, states of emergency etc etc are of course part of the game. In the US, where we do not have to deal with many of those things we take our internet for granted. Now for the first time here everybody has smart phones which work on 3G and you can connect to the internet with your phone. For a country that’s largely illiterate whatsapp offers voice messaging free and everyone is using it. But for me, I can’t work on the website on my phone…oh never mind…enough whining.  Just to say that I wasn’t able to post all that was going on. So here goes…

I am going to backtrack to my visit a week ago to Tamesna.  When I got out there on my first visit my goal was to see the kids at the school, which I posted right away, but I also wanted to check on our staff there so I had a party and invited them all to dinner.  Our major at the clinic, Mohamed, now has his wife Fati and his son Omar with him, the director of the school Assadek is newly married and his wife Rabi is a nurse who can help out at the clinic and can also help by sending monthly reports on the clinic and school.  I bought us a smart phone, which she will use.  If you go to a certain spot on the roof of the education center, you can sometimes actually get an internet connection and from there she can send her updates.

Also at the party were Zeinaba, the kindergarten and first grade teacher and her son Mohamed, Issouf our guardian (since Sidi is now mayor of Ingall we have named our own mayors at Tamesna) so Issouf is now mayor of Tamesna, Bahari is mayor of the kitchen and Alhassane is mayor of the corner of the roof (where he always sits at sunset) and of music.

Left to right: Me, Assadek, director of the school, his wife Rabi, Zeinaba, teacher, her son, Mohamed, Issouf, Mohamed, major at the clinic, his son Omar and wife Fati and Bahari, mayor of the kitchen.

No party at Tamesna is complete without some music from our in-house guitarist, Alhassane

And where there is music there is always dancing–the best dancer is Bahari.