Some pictures

May has been an incredibly busy month with trainings in Bamako and Kita, well building in my village and the shea butter soap training this last week.  I plan to write an entry on both the well and the shea butter training, but here are some pictures in the meantime:

Grasshoppers took over my garden in May.  They decimated it.  Goodbye eggplants!

This is what was left of one of my beautiful moringa trees after the grasshoppers got to it.  There were honestly thousands of grasshoppers in my garden.  Thousands.

A beautiful sunset in the garden on one of the first days of well digging.

It's been really hot in Mali this last month and a half, but the mangoes have been great.  Here are all of the women in my village lined up to sell mangoes.  Whenever a truck drives through town, they will immediately be surrounded by 10 mango sellers.  All with the same produce and the same price.  Somehow, they all make a profit.



May is wedding season in my village.  My host brother, Vieux, freshly returned from Libya, was married to Aminata two weeks ago.  This picture is of Aminata (in green), our Dugutigi and my host father Fadiala, Vieux (in the nice suit from Libya), Sali (my host mom and the Dugutigi's third wife), and me.

In early May, all of the volunteers in the Kita region of Mali gathered with our homologues in Kita for 4 days of In-Service Training.  Here we are at a dinner to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Peace Corps in Mali, and the 50th Anniversary of Peace Corps in general.