Welcome to hopefully the first of many blogs to com from Senegal. Now I know I said I would be posting frequently and I have meant to but doing so has not been easy. But enough of my excuses... im ready to roll. Alright so how to catch you up onto 6 weeks of living in Senegal. hrmm...
Like I said I live in the city of thies (pronounces like chess, sort of) which is a fairly large city. A couple hundred thousand people. It is roughly 1h30m from Dakar, the capital, and more importantly 45m from a quality beach. Well that is not more important but it is nice. I live with a wonderful family with many many people running around the compound. I guess that is important too, I don't live in a house per-say (is that a word?) but a compound. It is an area that has 4 buildings with a few rooms in each one. The buildings are situated on the perimeter leaving an open dirt area in the middle shaded by two large mango trees. Really it is quite wonderful. We spend all of our time sitting in the shade. At night my family rolls out the TV and we sit around, drink tea, watch TV. My mother also sells peanuts outside our house in the evenings. This rocks my world. Frequently I sit outside, people watch and munch on peanuts. I would love to show pictures but that is pushing it right now. Give me another month. hell, I have 26 more.
6 days a week I go to the peace corps training center to be educate about agriculture, senegalese culture, and to learn the language of pulaar. Oh pulaar. pulaar is something akin to the red neck language. It isn't so much elsewhere in Africa but it is in Senegal. Traditional pulaars are nomads. so they are throughout western Africa and can be found in 25 countries, no kidding. It is a funny language that often sounds like Japanese. I would love to be able to say a few phrases for you but writing them just doesn't carry the same affect. It isn't a written language, or wasn't until colonial times, so the fact that I can read pulaar is weird. Not that there are any books written in pulaar but... Whatever.
in two weeks I will be sent to my village to begin my service. This sounds funny but I am not actually allowed to write publicly what village I am in or my exact whereabouts except that I am in the Kaolack region. Pace Corps monitors our websites. It is for safety concerns that I am not allowed to say where. Anyways I am excited to be going and i shall be writing before than. Please keep emailing me,
Brad