Famoo Keta (Its been awhile)

Sorry everone, I haven't posted in awhile because I haven't really left village in awhile. I've been integrating and working on my language mostly. I teach at the primary school once in awhile and hold study sessions at my compound for the school children at night, mostly English lessons. I've also been involved with the community garden, starting tomato, ocra, and sorrel plots. The garden is absolutely beautiful with lots of women growing eveything from bananas to hot peppers, but its hard work: theres only one open well with a pulley system and the water table is about 100 feet down, so to water you bed you have to pull 10-20 five-gallon buckets of water up by pulley, but still they do it every day. Yesterday was a cool day: me and some of the guys ate monkey meat and onions cooked in oil in the afternoon, then I went and drank tea with some of the married women and we ended up dancing and singing Mandinka songs, then to cool off me and my friend Buba went to the river for a swim. We swam to the mangrove swamp and climbed high into a Mangrove tree and chilled out for awhile before plummeting back in from about 20 feet. The people in Bambali are very friendly, and being the only Toubab (white person), I'm always offered food and tea and invited to every compound to chat and dance. It can get exhausting at times but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Life in village is hard though. We had a woman in our compound die a few weeks back and no one knows why. Another woman lost her child during delivery, and theres too many infections and ailments to count. Because life is so haed the people depend 100 percent on the community for survival. Sharing is a way of life and private property only applies to cows, chickens, goats, and sheep. Whenever someone harvests their rice or cous or peanut fields, they give one tenth to what Mandinkas call Jakoo (a village level charity). When a particular family is struggling someone will bring the the rice or cous or peanuts in the middle of the night and leave it by the door so its there when they wake up. Also when a family cooks they set some aside to give to other compounds and the other compounds do the same. They may not have much in terms of money or material, but we could certainly learn a lesson from them in hospitality and kindness to neighbors...