Yorom Diallo et ll'oiseaux

bought a goat

yesterday I went to a huge animal market with Cheikh Diallo and we bought a young goat. He did some sewing work for me and in payment he wanted to have a pet goat.

The place was amazing. There were so many animals and they guys were bringing them to us, carrying them by one leg and showing us the teeth and eyes and the bellies, like they were already meat. Luckily the seller that we met at the gate was a cool one and he helped us to keep the situation calm.

We told him we wanted a young female and we were not going to slaughter her soon, so we cared about the health.

We had to be super patient until the sellers calmed downed and then we could look around calmly. For us what was important was the personality, because she will be a pet. So wee needed to see the animals when they were not hanging by a leg.

My friend told them I was a goat farmer from Germany and had many goats to avoid them telling me bullshit. One guy still told us that if we took the pregnant one he guaranteed that it would have twin male babies.

The one we chose is really nice, a small black and white girl, around 5 months old
She was very courageous. Many of them were just in a stoned panic and others were going crazy, running away from us. This one is curious and only acts scared when there is a real danger. Now she is at Cheikh's place, in the yard with the mama sheep and her baby.

Goats are a lot smarter than sheep, I bet she has already started to cause a lot of trouble, like eating the side of the house or something. She eats peanut plant leaves.

There is no much tradition here of naming animals but when Cheikh's neighbour saw the goat she said it must have his family name and she wanted us to give her the name of her daughter, so now the goat is called Senabu Diallo.

Sadly, I couldn't take a camera to the animal market, it would have been chaos. The sellers are super intense and with a big camera we never could ahve negotiated a decent price. Finally the goat cost 20,000 CFA which is the normal price here. (15,000 - 30,000) but we had to be very tuff to get this price and I started to get nervous because we had to pretend that we were going to leave the goat and go home. I didn't want to leave her once we had selected her so I really had to hope the guys were going to crack and allow us to pay the price we wanted to pay. Finally all 3 of us were lucky.

i think I will try to take her to the beach today.

power, no power, power

not a lot of electricity this week, it mostly shows up late at night when I want to sleep.
I realised/decided that I will have to rather collect my impressions and the documentation of what I am doing here and upon my return Iw ill be able to post more online. There is no point to stressing about having no access to the net, there are a lot of other great things to do, like jumping on trampolines, checking out nice fabrics and visiting the village of turtles.

We are now in the second week of dance/video workshops. Some basic info about the projects can be found at frontierlab.org/flou

me talking at FSM

our jardin suspendu poster

We prepared this poster with some text in french and printed it 1m/1m to hang beside the garden at the World Social Forum.  click the image to see it in bigger and read the text.

Thousands of people have passed by each day this week and we have explained the project to them. I look forward to the next couple of weeks when people get in touch with us to see how we can further the project. Its really intense to talk with so many people each day but the kind of fatigue we have every evening is a good kind. This project is so nice to work on.

Jardin suspendu travel to World Social Forum

Presk rendu au forum.

Photo par Bah Moody!

Notre stand au Forum. Photo par KRN.

Mr. Diedhiou et le jardin.

the garden is about to open