Where has the time gone?

How could June already be almost over? I'm on the fast track to finishing my service in Senegal and it makes me really uncomfortable when I think about it too much. I will announce my official Close of Service (COS) date in my next update but it will most likely be around the 1^st of November. That means I have a little more than 4 months to get all of my projects to a point where I can comfortably leave them or find someone who can take them over. That also means I have a lot of paperwork to do, grants to complete, PC bucket list items to accomplish, items to give away, items to accumulate, and too many goodbyes. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things in that list but I don't want to get into everything quite yet.

A couple of weeks ago we had our COS conference, which brought together all of the people who arrived in Senegal with me almost 2 years ago, some of whom I haven't seen since our In-Service Training in February 2012. It was great to see everyone and a few new faces who had transferred here from Mali when it was evacuated last April. This conference was set up to discuss exactly what we need to do before leaving and how to prepare for life post-Peace Corps. The administration offered some really great tools to make the adjustment easier, including resumés, job searches, and graduate school options. I'm glad it forced me to think about some of these things, which I might have procrastinated too long, but at the same time it felt a bit early to jump into thoughts of leaving. Now I can't get my mind off of it. I want to make my last 4 months really worthwhile, but that may prove difficult if I struggle to focus on being in the present. So that being said, we're going to skip to real life updates:

Gardens! I basically live in my garden right now. The rains are right around the corner; we had a decent rain 2 weeks ago which got everyone's hopes up and now the skies are just teasing us. So while we anxiously await the nectar of the gods I'm helping as many women as I can to get tree and vegetable nurseries growing so that soon after the rains become frequent we can transplant into their respective gardens. My two groups of women filled and seeded 1200 tree sacks each and after a few re-seedings we have most sacks growing with little thorny trees that will hopefully become a live fence around their 1 hectare gardens. This is a techniques we promote in Peace Corps Senegal because it offers a cheaper and more long-lasting protection option than a chain-link fence or a fence made of old sticks or millet stalks. I'm eager to see the trees get established and hopefully my replacement can help fill in any gaps next rainy season. We also planted beds of eggplant, bitter tomato (actually a type of eggplant), hot pepper, green pepper, and tomatoes, which will be divided up and transplanted in each woman's plot. Beyond those they will probably grow okra, tropical hibiscus, squash, beans, and whatever other seeds they can find the space to plant. In the dry season they haven't used their garden space because it is on the edge of town and far for everyone, plus trying to pull water from a 35-meter well every day to maintain their crops in this heat was a little absurd. Because of that I'm offering a portion of my garden for them to use for their nurseries, which is more centrally located and has easy access to water (I have a faucet and hose that fill up a large cement water basin in my garden).

Beyond laboring in my garden and helping the women's groups, the school year just ended so I'm wrapping up this year's school gardening project and figuring out how best to get that running again when school reopens in October so that it can survive until my replacement is ready to take it over. I'm also working with a Master Farmer about 10 km away from Kaffrine where we are preparing improved farming experiments and demonstrations for this rainy season. Last week I was out there measuring the the demo plots and discussing which techniques he wants to focus on this season. At the end of the rainy season we will have a big Open Field Day where farmers from all over the region are invited to come out and learn what was done and how well it worked, with the eventual aim that more farmers will adopt some of the techniques he is using.

We raised all the money we needed for this year's Girls Camp! I'm really excited that we can now make this project a reality. I have chosen 7 girls from Kaffrine and we will have a total of 40 girls from all over the tri-region area who will take part in a week of educational and inspirational experiences they would never have had the opportunity for otherwise. It will be held in late August and I'm still working on dance routine to teach (I might have put that on the back burner for a bit with some of my other work...). I'm also going to help with a geography activity, crafts, and overall energy. It's going to be phenomenal.

So right now is a lot of prep work. Most of my projects are either in the labor-intensive preparatory stage or in the wrap-up stage. And yet I still manage to make time for some minor projects as well. I'm helping to host a training about Moringa this weekend, I check up with other notable farmers and help them when needed, I'm still active in the Peer Support Network, I manage the local PC office in Kaffrine, and I'm constantly on the lookout for ridiculous adventures. All together I feel like I'm living a pretty decent life and I am not quite ready to give it up in order to return to whatever America has in store for me. All in due time.

P.S. In my efforts to combat the heat and because I think this is the best time in my life to experiment, I shaved my head.  It was one of the best decisions I've made in awhile!