First Week in Dakar

A house inside a bunker in a military installation on the coast

The president's house

My room with mosquito net and other necessities of Senegal

Fishing boats off the coast

   
    Here is my first post about my adventures in Senegal.  Sorry for the lack of detail and compactness, I should be able to post more often soon.  Please comment and let me know what you think!
    We arrived in Dakar really early on Monday morning. When we got off the airplane, it was immediately apparent that we were in a different country. The humidity is so high here that the air just surrounds and envelops you. I saw two kittens in the parking lot of the airport. There are animals everywhere here. We spent the first two nights in a hotel in Yoff, in northern Dakar, and I saw goats and puppies and horses pulling carts.
     For my first meal in Dakar, we had rice and fish. The food is served on a big platter and everyone eats with their hands. You squish the food together in a ball and eat it that way. Eating only with the left hand, which is the correct way here because they don’t use utensils and the left hand is unclean, is difficult to get used to.
    On our second day in Dakar we did a little tour of the city. In downtown Dakar, people followed us around yelling toubab, which is their word for white people, to get our attention. Waly, or French teacher, says that toubab is not an insult, just a way of indicating that you are foreign. It’s hard to not take offense, though.
    I met my host family in the afternoon of our second day. They live in the Fann neighborhood, which is very close to our school, WARC, and the corniche (the coast). Maman Niang, my host mother, showed me around the house. Papa Mamadou, my host father, was a professor and speaks English, as do my brothers (I have three, I think). Two nieces also live in the house and a sheep lives in the backyard. For dinner the first night, we had noodles and Maman pointed to them and said, “Spaghetti.” I wonder is that’s what they actually say in Wolof, the African language that most everyone speaks here along with French, or if she was just saying it for the benefit of me, the toubab.
   My walk to school is really nice. There are several embassies and ambassadors residences in my neighborhood. Each has a guy in a uniform sitting in front of the gate, and I try to say hello to all of them. The greeting is very important in Senegal and it is rude to walk by someone you know, or are even just vaguely acquainted with, without saying hello and asking how they and their family are doing.
    When I got home yesterday I had a whole conversation in French with Papa, which I was very proud of. I am slowly learning more words and how to conjugate my verbs in conversation. The most difficult conversation I have had is one with Maman in which she explained that I needed a mosquito net. I had no idea what she was talking about, but finally she acted out me getting bit by a mosquito and it made sense. One of the brothers bought the net for me and now I sleep under it every night. It makes me feel like a princess and prevents malaria.
More soon.  Love!

The guard outside the president's house.  We all thought he looked really silly until we saw the gigantic machine gun he was carrying.