Ramadan

Book “Grapes of Wrath”
Song “Consoler of the Lonely” The Racontuers It reminds me of Ramadan

So as you may of guessed, Ramadan will be starting on Sep 2. I plan to fast with my family and try to make it for most of the month. It will be hard to do it everyday since I will have to travel on a few of the weekends. But in general I should be able to adapt to the schedule.
Recently I took a little vacation with my host family to St. Louis. We celebrated the 15th of August (Assumption). We stayed at my host uncle’s house and spent the days at the beach or in town running errands. To celebrate people will stay up until the 5 am call to prayer. The marabou comes and will chant all night until in is time to pray. Then everyone goes home. The ceremony takes about 5 hours and consists or a meal of millet and beef. A cool thing that happened was that the same night we had a lunar eclipse. All the kids around the neighborhood freak out because they think it is the end of the world. The mosque will chant Allah over and over again until the eclipse is over, this is a tradition that has gone on for a long time and I was lucky to be able to see it happen. The last day I was there I received a call asking me to head to Thies to help with an auction. The auction is for gender development in Senegal. So I spent the next week in Thies working on that and watching some of the Olympics. After that we went to the beach for the day and night to relax a little. The following day we headed to Dakar where I had two meetings at the office. I had a pretty good trip and accomplished a lot along the way so I don’t feel as bad about being out of site for so long.

I wanted to also bring up the subject of development. I know many of you donate money to organizations, but to make a real difference volunteer. When you donate your money, you have no clue where your money is going. In some cases your money may not reach it’s intended targets. Or the money may just be wasted. At my site we have a new school for women. There are over 30 new computers that haven’t been taken out of boxes and rooms that aren’t ever going to be used. That is an example of receiving money and not receiving help from their organization. Take some time on your weekends and help out. People can really use it.