Girls with attitude

Sarah says...

The past couple of days have flown by, and it’s now only one week we have left here in Mossuril. We have been working on completing the murals on the nursery and SHINE building, along with some typography to accompany the butterfly on the LIFE building. It’s quite a difficult job, especially as the heat reflects off of the white walls directly on to us, but as always, we worked for an audience of amazed and beautiful eyes. It makes everything feel incredibly worthwhile. We have incorporated finishing our film festival programmes too- we consider this to be a break in the shade! Meanwhile, Elliott worked on a lino cut of the LIFE logo to make a small stencil to be placed around the town. This is mostly what has been happening since the last post. The days go by so quickly, but now I think I’m used to it being pitch black by 5:30pm. It’ll be strange to return back to the UK and have daylight for a further five hours.

We have had another beach trip too; this time it was more of a shower trip. The best feeling in the world. I can still smell the shampoo even after two days- I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not… As we come into our last week here, I’ve started to think about the things I’ll miss the most- the beach right on our doorstep for a start, but also the friendliness of absolutely everybody.

This leads me on to our walk today. We like to go for a walk each day with our cameras, capturing everything we see and want to remember. Today was a personal highlight for me. As we walked along the sandy track into town, a large group of women and young girls were gathered by dozens of water canisters, working away. Well, their work soon stopped as they spied our cameras.

Incredible posers I tell you! It’s a battle between them to fit into the picture- they all want to be right in the centre. My favourite part is when we show them the photos on the screen. I’ve never heard such loud squeals of happiness as they spotted themselves- it’s so heartwarming. Elliott made the point that it is probably the only time the women will have pictures of their babies and children. Even if they don’t have the physical photo, they will know that it’s out there somewhere. The smiles are absolutely adorable. It was also interesting to see this reaction from girls today. I’ve noticed before that the girls have been a lot more reserved than the boys, who usually strike the poses, but today was the complete opposite.

We also met someone else for the first time as we returned to the hotel. Someone I’d rather not have seen. A spider. A spider the size of my hand. Now the bugs don’t seem so bad. We tried to photograph it, but were obviously all too scared to get close enough… It was probably harmless, but also best we kept out distance!