Senegal adventure. Second week

     This week we worked  a lot. The Monday seemed eternal. We had a lot to do and a lot of pressure to finish. At the middle of the day a huge snake (huge for me, but like 50 cm long) appeared just in the middle if the field while we were working. We freaked out and the masons doing the pilars rapidly came to try to kill it throwing rocks at it. Finally, one of the masons hit it with a stick and killed it. Apparently it wasn't dangerous, but it scared us.

     I went to mass in the afternoon. I remember I got mad with my mom because she wanted to hear the mass in Notre Dame de Paris even if it was in French; but after that I understood that even if there are somethings I don't understand, the ritual is the same so the language doesn't matter. At the end if the day I wanted to go to Bignona, back to the seminar since there was going to be a mass for my grandfather in the morning. It took us a long to get there since we did many stops. We first stopped at a nice hotel and drink something at the shore of the river, watching how piroles (small wooden motor boats) come and go. Then we went to the hospital of Zinguachor,  I don't know why. They told us about the poor conditions of the hospital buy we couldn't get in.  There was just one nurse for 300 patients and the families of the sick people should cook and feed them because they didn't have this service. After three hours we reached Bignona.

     The next day we went to mass, it was the last mass of the school year for the primary school kids so all of them were there. It was a very nice experience and very comfortable to hear happy songs as if heaven was welcoming my grandfather. After the mass we drove back to Brin.

     The week went by fast. We had a lot of new problems and solutions for the system. First of all, the pillars were not at the position the required them, so the structure holding the panels didn't fit. Nevertheless, we locate the panels for a while at the floor and started charging the batteries. On Wednesday afternoon we already had electricity for the building, which we of course celebrated with some Gazelles. It was an amazing feeling of success even the work hadn't been finished. That night we made a fire to cook the dinner, as usual, and for the first time I went to the store by myself and ask for some tomato sauce in French. It was impressive to get into the small store and realize that there was no light and when I asked for the sauce, the guy just turned on a small flash light and looked for it. This reminded me when I was young and there were a lot of blackouts at my grandparents place in the Guatemalan countryside.

On Thursday we went to a crocodile farm, they had crocodiles of all ages and a lot of fruits and nice flowers. It was a nice visit. 

That night, when we were going to sleep I found a huge spider in the wall of my room.  It freaked all of us out, since we had never seen a spider that big. William killed it with a piece of wood, but even after that  I was so scared that was thinking to even sleep outside in the garden and not in my room. 

Even we had already connected the panels and were having electricity, they were not fixed on the pillars yet, since the pillars weren't finished and we had the problem of the distance between them.  We had asked for a certain distance between the panels and we just assumed that the masons were going to build them with the required specifications.  But, we assumed wrong and then we had a huge problem since the structure didn't fit on the pillars. After a lot of different ideas and some tries, we decided to rebuild the structure to make it fit on the pillars.  Then a smith came to make the angles to support the structure on the pillars. On Saturday afternoon, the masons, the smith and us work as hard and fast as we could and by the end of the day the panels were on top and fixed on the pillars. The next morning we just finished some connections and the system was almost finished so we decided to take some vacations.