More Books

I am sitting at home waiting for my lunch to arrive… it's 3:23pm. There has been another death in the family this week, so my host mother/sister I guess is at a gathering for that at the main family house. Earlier this week it was a grandmother who passed away and today it was a guy around my age. So my being hungry at the moment is not really the world's biggest problem at the moment, obviously.

Work this morning was great! We had three people come in from the local high schools to look at the books we laid out yesterday. We discussed how the project will proceed and what they are going to do, and what additional types of books they need for us. Right now, we're starting with three high schools… their English classes, English clubs, and books for the teachers. It also includes setting up basic libraries for students to be able to check books out of, because the current school libraries do not allow this. So at the moment there will be novels and geography books in it. Little by little. There are so many boxes and so little space at the school that is hard to see everything we have. So once we get these English textbooks out of the way, we will have some space to work with. Also, I would like to send a big thank you to the people who thought it a good idea to send "Keyboarding With Word Perfect 97" to Senegal. Not only do people here not use Word Perfect, but the keyboards in French speaking countries (like Senegal) don't use the same keyboard we use in America. We have hundreds of copies of this book that are useless and won't be going anywhere.

Tomorrow is another holiday, so I don't know how much work I'll be getting done. I still haven't mastered the Senegalese art of sitting around and doing nothing. So I'm hoping I'll be able to at least work in the morning, and then enjoy the festivities during the afternoon. I'm told that it's a holiday of eating, and children go from house to house begging for candy (much like Halloween), and that men dress like women and women dress like men. I'm not so sure about that last part of the holiday, so I'm interested to see what really happens.

Saturday I will return to Dakar again. My good friend, and fellow Rotarian scholar, Allen is leaving for the States within the week so I will return there to say goodbye to him.

It's 3:54pm… I still haven't eaten lunch. (And yes I've done other things in this half hour besides write this entry)