May Pictures

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 Some May pictures from my village:


The sunsets are beautiful here but difficult to capture in photos


See above comment about sunsets

 Ditto above

My friend Balla making a bed out of bankala, a palm-like tree that is used to make almost all the furniture in my village. Here he is measuring out where to cut the bankala

Cutting the bankala by whacking a machete with a wooden club

Arranging the cut pieces of bankala

Balla's friend making "nails" out of bamboo to hold the bed together

Spot the lizard

Taking my dad's bike to the forage to get water. Now that I don't have plants to water in my backyard, I use approximately one bidong (20L) of water a day. On laundry days I usually have to pump an additional two bidongs

Women gather huge stores of firewood for cooking before the rains come and everything in the forest gets soaked. They have been going every afternoon for many weeks now, carrying back one load at a time on their heads

A brand new hut, complete with new fence and gravel front yard. This is the same hut where I took pictures of the roofing a couple months ago

Boxes of bleach packet refils donated by an NGO to help people clean their water. Despite the good intention of the NGO (they gave out buckets and bleach packets a few months ago), I have not seen a single family use these to clean their water. The free buckets, on the other hand, get a lot of use

The trees in my backyard fold their leaves inward to hide from the midday sun


My failed attempt to balance this large log on my bike to wheel back to my house. I ended up coming back the next day to find a smaller log. I need two logs for my pull-up bar. Work on that project is progressing very slowly, but I had a slight bit of momentum and got logs before Ramadan
I finally got two logs with forks at one end for my pull-up bar. Next comes the digging of holes...I'll get to it eventually

My host brother Keeba gathering sand to fill tree sacs from the dried river bed

Keeba pushing my host dad's bike, loaded with a small bag of sand, up the river bank



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