Dakar

So I’ve been in Dakar for 6 days now and I haven’t blogged yet for several reasons:

• Internet has been kind of sparse for me because my super cool new Chromebook doesn’t work with the USB Wifi key that my host Dad is letting me use.  Now he is letting me borrow an old laptop while I’m at home because he cannot imagine how I, or anyone else, could live without the internet during the evenings and weekends.  Super nice of him.  And yes, I’m still in Africa, and yes, they have awesome technological communication systems.  Better and cheaper than ours too.
•  I have been taking intensive Wolof/French classes during the day and it has been incredibly mentally exhausting.  Therefore, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and produce more words in a third language.  Two a day is plenty.
•  I would have to be blogging constantly to capture everything that seems noteworthy to me.  The sights, people, smells, noises, cars, animals, languages… life is an assault on the senses here, and most of the time I’m feeling overwhelmed, so I couldn’t really figure out where to start.
• A lot of the things that have happened so far have been pretty negative, so I wanted to wait until more positive things started happening so that I didn’t sound like a big whiny baby on here.  Living in another country is much more difficult than I thought it would be, and I was definitely aware that it would be hard, but it has surpassed all of my expectations… and that’s all I have to say about that right now haha.

So, yeah… I know I have to start somewhere, so I decided to sit down and just write about a few trivial things that happened yesterday.  Hopefully soon I have time/the will to write more about my family and my house and such things… but for now, I’ll just stick with some simple things.

So I have a baby sister.  (I actually have 3 sisters, but more about that later) She is five years old - a very sassy and manipulative little thing – and she told me that her name is spelled “Nmo”, but it’s pronounced like “Joff”, and always Baby “Joff”… she’s pretty young and likes to trick me so she could have just been telling me letters, or potentially that’s just how you spell/pronounce it in Wolof.  Either way, I’m just going to go with it because I ask too many questions already haha. 

I learn the best things from my baby sister.  Yesterday she gave me one of her bracelets and taught me the name in Wolof… “jaam” I think is how it would be spelled.  Also, I let her use my highlighters to color with… so that she would stop hitting and biting me… and that has been very entertaining.  She kept telling me to “dessine un bonhomme de toi!”  I knew she wanted me to draw a picture of myself (we mostly communicate with select French words and by physically showing each other what we mean)  but I couldn’t understand what a “good man” had to do with it.  Apparently, a “bonhomme” is a “fellow” or a “guy” and I’m thinking that’s the word for “stick figure.”  And I think that’s a pretty awesome translation.  I’m going to try to find a kid’s book in French that we can read together.  I can help teach her how to read, she can stop beating me up for fun, and I’m sure she will keep teaching me French/Wolof too. 

I talked to a guy on the bus yesterday very briefly.  It was super packed and the driver was especially rough on the gas and break pedals.  He looked at me and rolled his eyes and said, “ugghh le transport…” and we shared a moment of slight irritation.  He knew a tiny bit of English, but we spoke mostly in French… and he asked me if I was French so apparently my French was coherent (which was shocking for me, I’ve really been struggling with it).  I told him that I took Wolof classes for the first three days and then switched to French classes because Wolof was too hard for me right now.  He’s said that’s ok, at least you tried.

There’s definitely something to be said about at least attempting to learn a country’s native language.  Sure, I could get by with just French, but people smile and genuinely appreciate the fact that I took the time to learn how to greet them properly.  A girl I met yesterday said that it’s just important to “meet people on their own terms.”  That completely makes sense to me, and those two conversations made the three grueling days of Wolof lessons totally worth it.

I got a little teary-eyed just now when I realized I’ve only been here for 6 days and I’ve already crushed my goal of overcoming my fear of talking to strangers.  I constantly feel like a girl in the boy’s bathroom here; all day long people on the street or wherever stare at me and I can tell they’re talking about me, because I mean, needless to say, I stand out.   I pretty much look for someone to talk to at all times in order to make some kind of connection to reality in a place that seems so unreal.

Anyways... I'm about to do some amazing things already this weekend... pictures soon!