Malnourished Intoxicated PCVs vs the USMC

It's that time of year again.  I am in Dakar, where we came last week for the West African Invitational Softball tournement.  By 'we' I mean pretty much every volunteer in Mauritania except 4 or 5.  Being a big group, we decided to rent out a few buses to drive down.  We did this last year, it was a disaster.  Eight flat tires and a detour for one hour in the wrong direction meant we didn't get into Dakar untill 10.  We thought we would have better luck this year.

Clearly we had been out in the sun too long.

The buses themselves were actually fine, no tire issues, crowded, but not too bad.  It wasn't until we had been driving for a few hours that we realised the problem: our driver was practically blind.  It was hard to tell at first, because the sun wasn't up and those of us in the bus were all asleep, so only a few people noticed how Hamed would drive full speed at a slow or non moving object and then swerve abruptly when it was about 15 feet away.  It was a little more obvious for those in the little bus behind us, whose driver had 20:20.  Anyway, it was broad daylight when Hamed swerved to avoid something he was only able to make out when it was 5 feet away,lost control, and ran the bus off the road, nearly running over a family of five that was breakfasting in thier tent and smashing the bus into the only sand dune for 200 meters in any direction.  No one was hurt, the bus was buried.  It was as Hamed was sort of wandering around the bus in a confused manner that we realised how senile he was and that we were really quite lucky to be alive.  Anyway, after about 12 attempts at pushing the bus out failed we called in our local super hero, Cheihk Gueye, our volunteer services officer, who was at the time 30 minutes away in Rosso getting our passports through at the border.  He sent a tow truck from the phone company and in a truly spectacular sight, it freed the bus from the dune.  But we were still afflicted with Hamed the Hopelessly inept.  And his sidekick, the driver from the second bus, Moktar the Misinformed.  It was after we left Rosso senegal that it was revealed neither driver had ever been to Dakar; and didn't knowthe road.  We took one wrong turn because Moktar refused to listen to the volunteers who did know the road, and he drove us through the bird park to a village on the ocean, where the paved road ended.  Moktar's response was, I kid you not; "they must have moved the road".  He then got his bus stuck in the sand and the whole village was laughing at him for a good ten ,inutes before helping us push it out.  We got into Dakar after dark, where it became evident that Hamed was terrified of the other cars, buses, and even inanimate objects that crowded the streets.  he had a habit of stopping the bus in the middle of the freeway every time we tried to give him directions, and once when we had to turn left off an access ramp, stopped the bus across the lanes of traffic.  Needless to ay none of us cared that he had no way to know how to get home, and kissed the ground when we finally arrived at the American Club.

As usual, we had the most eccentric, loud, rowdy, and generally obnoxiuos team at WAIST.  In addition to a fat suit we had giant pirate flags that said "surrender the booty", a megaphone, a boombox, and a high blood alcohol content.  I played on the B team, the swashbucklers.  As scire keeper I was dissapointed to learn that i couldn't play because I had to keep track of all the batters stats, but I was good at it, and was still a part of the team, so I was ok.  Then on the second day after a particularly rowdy party the night before we had barely enough people to field a team, so I was put out in left field.  My sisters play softball; but I never did, so this was an experience.  Luckily, the first game we played the team that had hosted the party so they were equally drunk/ hungover.  I hit the ball twice and scored 2 runs.  The second baseman kept a bottle of wine at the plate and gave every runner that got there a drink. Softball is fun.

The Pirates, our A team, played really well, supported by the constant presence of  40 to 50 supporters lining the baseline, screaming; running the flag around the bases after each inning, performing a kickline in their underwear to distract the opposing team's players, and Michael D a Selibaby volunteer dancing around in an inflatable sumo suit.  The championship game was Monday afternoon, against the Baobab Bashers; a Dakar team made up of equal parts employees of USAID and the embassy Marines.  Or it was supposedly equal parts; I saw a LOT of buzz cuts.  So yeah, 13 malnourished, dehydrated, unpracticed, out of shape, partially drunk irreverent volunteers against the pride and joy of the US Marine Corps.  We creamed them.  I think the final score was somewhere in the neighborhood of 23 to 7.  We called our Country Director; who was in Mali dealing with the redistribution of the former Guinea volunteers who had just been evacuated, and he interrupted his meeting to brag to the heads of the other west african programs, a few of which had sent teams, that his volunteers had just won WAIST a third time.  Which, in my opinion, is only fitting; since for us this is seriously the happiest time of the year. No one has more fun than us because no one looks forward to this as much as we do.

Nicole and I are hanging out in Dakar for a few more days before leaving for Ghana on Friday.  The plan is to see an elephant or die trying.

love

amy