I've just had my happiest week, to date, in Senegal.
(You know you're a Colorado girl when... it takes a mountain top to make you feel like yourself. )

Senegal is much, much more beautiful than I have given it credit for. Both land and people. As our bus rolled away from the exhaust, bustle, and dirt of Dakar, a very different Senegal emerged:

• NATURE. Dr. Seuss-inspired fields of chunky baobabs, thick with bulbous fruit; baboons, pheasants, and warthogs scurry from their road-side basking spots; Colorado-like expanses of blue, blue sky big enough to watch three different storm systems tumble acoss; red rocks and electric green grass; mountain hikes each day leading up to enclosed tumbling cascades, mountain-top animist villages, or the biggest baobab in western Africa; mosquitos and bed bugs. (and itchy arms, legs, ankles, toes...)
• Thatched roof villages of no more than a few dozen huts pepper the valleys
• Women turn to one another, laughing and chatting, while ambling down a major road with 5-gallon bowls of peanuts balanced atop their heads
• Poverty...When it rains, the roof washes away, and there may or may not be money to fix it. When it doesn't, the crops stop growing, and there may or may not be money to buy other sources of nourishment. Not scary, just real.
• Self-Sustained lifestyles. (eat, wear, cook with, and play in what you grow and make.) Inspiring.
• Wandering into small market, I find myself surrounded by crowd pressing in toward the village's holy medicine man. Stocky, shirtless, hair sticking in every direction, covered in intertwining gris-gris (luck charms). He demonstrates his powers by slowly sharpening a sword then pretending to cut his own belly, neck, and eye with it. Suddenly a nail goes up his nose and he pauses to discuss the medicines he is selling.
• When all else fails, sing. Head, shoulders, knees and toes...Hore, ballawa, kopi, tepe (sung with the peul bonde tribe).
• When one is offered a hair braiding at 10:30 am, one might assume this will not interfere with an appointment at 4pm. This is not a safe assumption.
• Accepted into two new families, first a diallonke family in Kedougou: the chef de quartier, three wives, and 25 children. Renamed me Bintou Camara. First night, pouring rain drove a herd of us into the hut that I understood to be my bedroom for the evening. Two hours of laughing, photo-sharing, and exploration of language barriers...suddenly the lights are out and it is time for bed. Confused, I try to count the number of differing breath patterns present in the room in order to discern how many people are staying in the one-room hut. I find out in the morning that there were 7. 2 on my bed, 3 on the other, and my 50 year old mother and a 3 year old child on the floor. This was normal.
• Went with new aunt to baptism. 50 men sitting and praying on one end of a courtyard. 50 women chatting, singing, dancing, and shaving the newborn's head on the other. I am accepted and welcomed. Fed often. Smiled at. Invited to take photos. Suddenly the warm, smiling woman next to me (who had patiently explained all aspects of the baptism to me and often gave me reassuring squeezes of the hand...reminded me a lot of Ruth K!) takes a plate of yellow powder from a passing woman, presses her thumb into it, and smears it across me forehead. I have been blessed. Later, I am led into a back room and suddenly the newly shorn, now sleeping baby is in my arms. The mother smiles.
• Second family: Chef de village for the Peul Bonde tribe with four wives (two inherited after death of older brother) and ten children. Life here is non-stop, from dawn until well after dusk, and yet it moves at the slowest pace...inexplicable. We sit for hours. Every part of every meal can be directly traced back to the land

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