These past few weeks I have continued to meet more and more people and visit different organizations that I can potentially work with. I’m flooded with new information about people, my town, Senegal, and everything else imaginable ranging from traditional medicine to the proper way to make Senegalese tea.

I have also started Wolof tutoring with a teacher at the vocational school for girls. Neither of us really know how to go about teaching a language that is largely a spoken language, it was only put into writing 20 years ago or so (nobody here writes in it). But, we plug away at it and I think I am beginning to make some progress, slowly but surely.

My tutor shares a house with several other teachers – teachers are placed in schools by the state and consequently don’t necessarily work in their hometowns. So they live in faculty housing which is a lot like a college apartment. I’m becoming friends with the teachers in her house and am spending more and more time there, which has been great. They are all very engaging, easy to talk to, and are patient with any language barriers we encounter.

Also, feeling the need to start doing something more tangible, I’ve started helping my tutor with one of her English classes at the school. Yesterday was my second day of class and all of the girls choose English names for the class. They were all very excited to have English names and kept on saying “my name is ____” and then giggle uncontrollably. The style of class is so different than American classes. It is solely based on repetition so I’m not sure how much the girls are retaining or comprehending, but it’s too soon to judge.

Finally, this past weekend I went to a village about 30 km south of me to meet with an NGO and several women’s groups that want to start selling vegetables at a local market. To get down there, I was told there was a mini-bus that left from Nioro every afternoon. After waiting at the garage for several hours and seeing no sign of the bus, I began to ask around and finally another car headed in that direction showed up. I don’t know what kind of car it was but probably about the size of a Ford Escape and designed to hold 6 people. When all was said and through, we were tumbling down the road with 15 people in the car and a live goat tied to the roof.

Once I got to the village, a volunteer there told me about a huge, weekly party that happened to be that night. It didn’t begin until a little after midnight, but there were people from all of the surrounding villages. People were dancing to a group of drummers and there were two commentators with microphones announcing who was arriving (in the same way that announcers work the red carpet before a large film premiere). The announcers immediately took a keen interest in the two Americans at the party and conducted a 20 minute interview with us, which ended by them saying “You have everything you want here: dancing, food, Americans.” The party is actually more of a giant wrestling competition in which each of the villages selects a representative for the event. The wrestlers then compete in a round-robin tournament through the night. The wrestling was occasionally interrupted by kids sprinting through the ring with flaming torches and other events. I can’t really say that I understood everything that happened there, but it was definitely amusing.

All in all, things are going well here and I am beginning to feel more comfortable with the town, my family and my activities. I hope you are all well.

love
Chris