September 16, 2007 (First Day!)

I'm in Dakar! I arrived on Saturday evening. From the air, Dakar looks much like Google Maps makes it look, but more real. The airport was not nearly as hectic or bad as I was expecting, so that was a pleasant surprise. Two people from the Baobab Center picked me up, a woman and a man. The woman will be one of my Wolof teachers this week. During the 20 minute drive to my house we ate dates, because they had to break their fast for the day. We also stopped by the most modern-looking building which we passed on the drive, which was a gas station/convenience store. They bought me an orange Fanta, which of course was delicious.

The buildings in Dakar look very square and rectangular and simple. Right as we were landing, we passed over a neighborhood that to me looked like it was bombed out (side note: no neighborhoods in Dakar are bombed out, this is not a violent place), but upon closer look I could see there was a lively futbol (soccer) game taking place in the streets and people standing on the roofs. Many of the buildings look like that in the city. Some are abandoned, but most I could see had a light on somewhere. One of the things that give the buildings the "bombed-out" look is that hardly any of them have windows with glass, just the window holes. My house fits that description as well, except that there are shutters on each of the windows.

After a 20 minute drive or so, I was taken directly to my host family's house. Some of the streets are paved, but even most of them that are still are not paved like us Americans are used to, and there are periods of time when paved streets go through a patch of being sand and dirt. We live on a somewhat busy street. There's a wall in front of our house and a gate to walk through to get in. No one uses the front door, instead we walk through a corridor to get to the backyard, and enter the building from there. The house itself has three bedrooms and a common area. I have one bedroom, another student from Denmark has the second bedroom, and the rest of the family shares the third bedroom (There's eight of them). The kitchen and bathroom are outside the house, but attached. One must exit the house and go into the backyard to get to them. There is a toilet, but it doesn't flush. One must pour a bucket of water into the toilet bowl to "flush" it. The shower is what looks like a 2 ft by 2 ft area in the corner of the bathroom which is lowered by about 2 inches, and there's a showerhead that detaches, but no shower curtain or anything like that. And of course, there's no hot water. But in this kind of heat, the cool water feels really good.

It is terribly hot here. I really don't mind it, but it makes you tired after a little bit. The mother of the house has already taken two naps today, and insisted that I take one as well. It's hard to sleep in the heat though. They did give me a fan, so that helps a bit. It is much cooler outside simply due to the fresh air and the breeze. The boys run outside and douse themselves with water from the spigot to cool themselves off. In this heat, they're dry in only a minute or two.

The boys have been playing futbol off-and-on in the backyard of the compound all day. I joined them for a bit. I've also been hanging out with little Marianne who is 6 years old. She's a constant source of entertainment. If I want privacy, I must go into my room and shut the door. If I do that, for the most part (as in now), they do not bother me. But if I leave my door open, even though I have a curtain over it, Marianne always comes in to see what I'm up to and whether or not I want to play a game. She came in here earlier today and I was clipping my fingernails, so she ran out and came back with her own nail clipper and did the same.

We have a sheep! Well, the kids tell me it's a sheep, but it doesn't really look like one. It's terribly skinny, and has hardly any hair. It looks more like a goat. But if you can imagine the sound of a sheep belching, that's the sound this animal makes. It's terribly terribly loud. It woke me up very early this morning. The sheep is tied up by its ankle in a corner of the backyard. Its meal this afternoon was pages from old magazines. It has been belching for the past hour or so, so I went out to see if I could figure out why, and it had tangled itself up around its tie-out and could hardly move, so I untangled him. At least now he's only belching on occasion instead of every 10 seconds.

One last note. The first billboard I saw when on the way to my host family's house was one that advertised Desperate Housewives. Yep, I was surprised as well. And this morning while I was eating breakfast, the kids were playing video games in the same room as me. They then decided to go outside to play futbol, but Mohammed found a channel that had Celine Dion singing on it, and he said "Is this English?" and I said yes, so he left it on for me and ran outside. 20 seconds later, Moctar came in and asked me if I liked something (I couldn't understand what that something was), so when I told him I didn't understand, he ran over to the television and changed it to a channel that had the new Justin Timberlake music video playing, smiled at me and told me that he knew who Justin was, and then ran back outside to play futbol. And so I finished my bread, butter, and tea while listening to Justin sing Lovestoned and watching Marianne dance along to the music.