it's been quite a while ( Read more... )

if you're in oxford on friday night, i'll be having milkshakes and coke floats at my house to show off my drums and pictures to friends =) if you want to come by, feel free!

so i'm leaving in about 12 hours. crazy that 2 months have gone by so quickly ( Read more... )

back from a week in the "bush" -- diatta fahka with my peace corps volunteer friend. it was amazing and i loved every minute of it! my friend emma and i went and stayed for 6 days ( Read more... )

yesterday i went to malicka, a sprawling suburb of dakar. thats where the dutch missionary has the djembe workshop =) SO i hopped in and started working with the guys who are all really nice and accepting. im about to go there again in a minute...yesterday i hitched a ride with a missionary couple but today im going public transport = approx 2 ( Read more... )

this weekend was really great. i went to the beach on sunday with djibril and ami, my younger sister, and we all three rode djibrils scooter out. so djibril drove and me and ami rode on back. dangerous, yes, but tons of fun. 3 people on one scooter (which is a motorcycle by the way) is bizarre as it is and a scooter with 3 people and one being ( Read more... )

yesterday i saw laura bush. in her motorcade! it was nuts, tons of cars. shes in senegal for a bit i think...not really sure. someone said shes looking at a few NGOs. when gwbush came a few years back he visited Goree island, which was a big slave exchange point. theres a slave mansion on the island with the door of no return. its a pretty ( Read more... )

tuesday we finished the 6 djembes we'd been working on. the last thing to do was shave the hair off the animal skin on the drum for the head...but alissan's doing that today so i don't get to learn how to do that just yet...thank goodness. i haven't done tons of really nasty things in my life...but washing animal skins for the djembes was pretty ( Read more... )

so after not getting to carve b/c i'm "bad" at it...i ended up just sitting around for a whole day...9am-5pm. watching allissan work. i wanted to stick pins in my eyeballs i was so bored! =) yesterday we went downtown and started buying the materials for me to make my own drum which was nice. i took a 3 hour nap on accident. it was nuts. ( Read more... )

So drum working has been pretty interesting. each day i go to allissan's house and he teaches me a new step and then i try to do it. example, yesterday we did drawings on all the drums...like drawing these african huts and african back scenes...(these djembes are for tourists) he showed me how he likes them done and then i did some. Today ( Read more... )