Crazy Adventures in the Life of a Redhead

I am happy to be back in the Philippines with a family I love dearly (Happy Family Bible Training Center) although I miss Senegal and the African continent. The weather is much more agreeable and I love the fact that I am eating much more vegetables than in Senegal. I have to say, I am not pining for Ceb bu Jen (greasy rice and fish and overcooked vegetables but fairly tasty when eaten in small quantities). I have 17 students and am a part of a staff of three faithful colleagues and three novices who have joined within the last two years. The Philippines has two seasons: rainy and dry; but the rainy can be really rainy—serious flooding and torrential downpour—or consistent rain—once a day for several hours. Thankfully, I have only experienced the latter because rain can become a bit tiring when clothing does not dry (the sun is the only dryer we have), books mildew, moldy smells stagnate and dampness never lifts from the air. I have yet to establish a period in which I get ...

my Couchsurfing host For many years, I have been dreaming of making a trip to northern Africa, particularly Morocco and Tunisia. When looking at flights from Dakar to Manila, I noticed that one pathway routed me through Tunis, the capital of Tunisia; I made a stop off for five days and was entirely glad I did. What a beautiful country! My first objective was to find a host in Tunis—through Couchsurfing—to discuss and live Tunisian culture and to keep my bags for me as I traveled south. I was blessed with an incredible host—a female student of medicine who is my age—who took me into her family’s home, fed me copious amounts of delicious food that her mother made and willingly conversed on an array of topics pertinent to our intersecting cultures. I started in Carthage before heading south, with a fast tour of the Roman ruins remaining on this very rich historical site. There is something about nearly 2000-year old bricks that quite intrigues me. I suppose the...

Not only did I spend my final days in Senegal visiting my friends and host family members, but I also attended a two-day wedding celebration. The groom is one of my friends from the Beer-Sheba project and he invited me to enjoy the celebration with his friends, family and neighbors. I knew that it would be quite the affair because my friend knows a lot of people and is highly regarded in his community, but the number of attendees and the amount of dancing surprised me. We danced for nearly two days straight although I pooped out the first night at midnight and the second night at 10:30 pm. I am not used to Serer wedding celebrations! What I loved most was the tradition of waiting for the bride to arrive. Both the bride and the groom have their own separate parties the day before the actual wedding ceremony, with the bride arriving at some point late in the evening or early in the morning to join her bridegroom. The fascinating point is that the groom does not know when his ...