Who's at my house right this minute?

Here's who I see when I look around my front porch right now:

Aly playing his new very nice new gongoma - he's not sleeping, I think he is looking down at the gongoma. We also got some beautiful djembes, I will take some pics of them tomorrow, and we also got some big bells and we have a set of duns in the making.  If anyone's interested in purchasing anything, let me know!

And here is Papis, our director of operations, who has everything in order here at the house. He also appears to be sleeping, but he is just relaxing after a hard day's work.

Here is Lopes, a great drummer and one of Aly's good friends who played a pivotal role in helping us find great instruments! I think he has been here for about 3 days!

This is a drummer who hangs out with us, and his name won't stay in my head but it begins with a K!

Here is Aly's younger brother Seydouba, who decided to sing while I took his picture. He is always laughing, and I have nicknamed him Togotogoya, which means butterfly in Susu.

A couple of days ago, Aly's family came by and his younger sister braided my hair while they were here - finally! I don't have any pictures of my hair yet, because I'm the one who has been taking the pictures. In this picture is Aly trying to put Bountou onto Aicha's lap, and next to her Oumou is looking on.

The picture below includes Aly, Bountou, Aicha, Oumou, Marietou, Nga Bountou (who Bountou was named after), Fanta and her daughter Kadiatou, nicknamed Yetou.

Here is Aly's brother/cousin Diego and his older brother Elhadj.



Here are the dancers warming up at today's Merveilles ballet rehearsal

Here's another shot of the Merveilles warm up today

And here's the men:

You can see the back of Yamoussa Soumah's head in the bottom of the pic above - I will try to get a better picture of him tomorrow!

We have a Merveilles dundunba to attend tomorrow, so that will make some good video if I can only get it uploaded.

I've been trying to upload some little video of Sophie dancing with the Merveilles dancers for their warmup. It is telling me 4 hours to upload a 2 minute video, so I just switched to a little 16 second video about 45 minutes ago, and I'm still waiting on it to finish! I'm hampered by the fact that I do not have a video editor on my laptop either. Aha, here it is - I will keep trying to load more, but this seems to be the most difficult thing of everything i've tried to do here!