It's Ba-a-a-ck

Rainy season in the Gambia definitely is definitely back.  It was slow getting started, but once it got going it has been doing its best to make up for the slow start.  There are some paved roads in The Gambia, but the majority of them are sandy dirt.  Rain can really wreck havoc with them, creating channels and pot holes that make car travel interesting to say the least but sometimes even walking can be difficult.  The pictures I have attached were taken from the corner nearest to my compound. In addition to the water it also shows the way that compounds in the city are configured.  None of the grassy spaces of Mariama Kunda (my training village) but one compound after another with adjoining walls. The other pictures are the other roads from the corner.  As you can see there is water, a lot of water.  Since I came with the education group, they trained us in the summer before the next school year started.  Because of this I will have the privilege of experiencing 3 rainy seasons.  There is one good thing about the rain though.  By the end of October you just get the sun without any cloud cover and it is bloody hot.  The rain at least keeps temperatures to tolerable levels.

The girl below is the daughter of the bitek owner on my corner.  Her name is Bintu and she is rather fascinated with good ol' toubob Rindi.  I included the picture because #1 she is such a cutie but also because you kinda get a long distance glance at my compound in the background. If you look behind her you can see double red doors above her left shoulder which are doors to a garage, the beginning of the compound. Then you see a brownish horizontal streak in the background above the middle of her head.  That streak is a beam above the entrance to the compound. She is leaning on one of the doors to the bitek, behind which is stacked bags of charcoal. These are not briquettes, but charcoal that villagers have made themselves by burying slow burning wood which is a source of income for them. Many city dwellers still cook their food over charcoal the same way they did in Mariama Kunda.

The following picture is not a rainy picture but shows that there is an up side to the rainy season -- The Gambia turns green again.  I was in Region 2 a couple of weeks ago and took a picture from an upstairs window.  Everywhere you looked you saw the green of growing crops, often with women tending to them, bending straight over from the waist (ouch!). If you zoom in you can see a group of them.

Spiders in Tanzania

There were many sights Stone Town  that I might get around to sharing someday.  However the one thing they had that definitely caught my eye was giant spiders (at least in comparison to US spiders).

The first one that I saw was in Stone Town, the oldest settlement on Zanzibar.  We were walking along when I spotted a spider in the middle of his/her web and decided it was photo op time.  The result is below. A person passing by told me to watch out, that it was a black widow.  However I doubt it since I have never heard about them being large.  I have yet to Google images of black widows but I will if I remember.

After shooting this picture I walked about 50 feet further and there was another one just as big hanging out in the middle of another web but I passed up the this opportunity.
Two days later at my hotel, I came across two more big spiders in the same web.  The first picture below is another closeup of one of the spiders.  He was just as evil looking as the one in Stone Town

The next picture is not so close up so that you can see both big spiders, but if you zoom into the picture you can see a much smaller version of the type of spider farther down in the picture.  There were even smaller babies in the web but I did not get them in the picture.  You can also get an idea of the size of these guys by their size in relation to the leaves in the picture.  I am just glad that they did not decide to come and visit me in my hotel room.