This has been happening a lot. I wake up early and can’t go back to sleep, and then I feel tired about an hour later and can barely stay awake. My attack of drowsiness came at the beginning of a three hour meeting this morning during which we reflected on our upcountry trip and discussed our research project ideas. I struggled to remain conscious the entire time. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one dozing off. In fact, compared to some, I was quite lucid.

I have pretty safely settled on my research project. I’ll be working with a women’s garden in Bakau, looking at women’s roles, the role of a women’s group within society and the lives of its members, etc. Also, I’ll be gardening, which I’m pretty psyched about. The women here are amazing. I hope to work a theme of empowerment into my paper, but that will only happen if the women are actually empowered. Keep your fingers crossed.

There are a couple other students who are interested in women’s empowerment, and someone decided that it would be good if we headed to a local NGO that has something to do with that. Sarah, Megan, and I accompanied Awa to FAWEGAM, which stands for Forum for African Women Educationalists Gambia Chapter. We talked with Momodou Saho for quite a while about what Fawegam does and where it gets its funding, of which very little had to do with my topic. It was interesting anyway. He did talk about the mothers’ clubs that Fawegam forms to provide support for girls in school. Awa is enthusiastic about taking me to meet a mothers’ club sometime, and I would definitely be interested in talking to the women about what they do.

The three of us students were going to head back to Happy Camp, but Awa invited us to have some domoda at her compound, and it would have been very rude to turn her down. Besides, her family is nice and her son is attractive. We played with her kids, ate her food, and drank the attaya that Ebrahima brewed for us. We were there for a couple hours. I love that a casual remark about domoda can turn into an entire afternoon.