I'm resolved, by the way, and enjoy the links

Just a quick note to say that I appreciate Vicki a lot more now. She's pretty damn funny, in fact. Here a couple of Vicki-isms:

At dinner the other night, she retold a story about how she said her grandson looked like a 'Ukrainian potato-picker' -- her daughter-in-law didn't like this too much, but we thought it was hysterical.

The other morning, when she was trying to figure out the hotel bill, she kept coming to us with news about how we were to handle this (it was complicated because we split two rooms, and there were uneven numbers of people in each), and she could tell that it was getting obnoxious, so the last time she came up, she said, "sorry to be Typhoid Mary, but I have one more stipulation.." -- we about died from laughter.

And another time, when we were at the Baobab Center eating lunch, she changed tables because the table we were sitting at was in the sun, and she wanted to be under the shade, and when she got up to leave, she said, "I'm gonna get under the shade... and, I don't like you." It's dry, but I gotta hand it to her, it's FUNNY!

I hope to get some more Vicki-isms...

And I think, despite the minor irritations, everything she says comes from the heart.

She's a spiritual woman, too, and I respect that. We had a wonderful conversation yesterday about spirituality and AA. Apparently she has many friends in AA, and she respects the program tremendously. She is involved in some kind of efforts to bring AA to Senegal and West Africa, but I don't know too much about it. I told her that I had looked for AA in Senegal, but that there was nothing available online. She said to talk to Gary, the director of Baobab Center, that he should know of something. In fact, one of her best friends who lived here for years (an American woman), was an alchoholic who had attended a few AA meetings in Dakar for Westerners, but that she wasn't ready to quit, and 2 months ago she died from liver cancer. I was humbled by this information, because this woman had done SO much for Senegal with her NGO (non-governmental organization) to help preserve indigenous culture and to promote education. It was humbling because she was an amazing woman who did so much; so much that she had a street named after her, but even that wasn't enough motivation to quit drinking. It makes me hate this disease. It also makes me that much more grateful for my own sobriety. I'm one of the lucky few, and I hope not to take that for granted, now or ever.