I went to my first Rotary club meeting this past Friday, and finally touched base with my “marraine” or my host counselor. She’s fabulous, her name is Madina (sp?) and she works for the UNDP and travels beaucoup. Also, who happened to show up at the Rotary meeting, but John and Abraham! They are two guys here that working on an independent research project. They’re very nice and we went out to dinner together with a French guy named Franck. Franck actually knew them and invited them to the Rotary meeting. The meeting itself was very interesting, and would have been more interesting if I had understood more. Unfortunately, it was all in french and it was all in Parisian french, which is much more difficult to catch on to than Africain french. All the same, everyone was very kind, and I introduced myself, and I will be getting a slot to give a speech some time over the next few months. It’s a pretty small club, and I was surprised to see so many white people, but this apparently is unusual and there are many Senegalese members they just happen to be VERY busy which is usually the case with Rotary people.
Saturday, Kelly and I went downtown to get some money so that I could buy some minutes for my card and boy now I can call lots of people. Email me your number and I’ll give you call on the weekend, but make sure it doesnt charge your cellphone to receive longdistance phone calls. I also saw a Halloween pumpkin sign on a boulangerie and it made me somewhat homesick… although why it was on the window of a bakery, I have no clue - they weren’t even selling Halloween cookies or candy.
Kelly also bought a bathing suit and I ate a hamburger, but it made me feel so sick… but it wasn’t the food that was bad, it was like eating a burger made me just feel so heavy… which doesn’t make that much sense considering my meals at home are doused with oil. Senegalese burgers are interesting, they put an egg and fries on the sandwich.
We then took off for the beach and… yet again those roads get my stomach every time. We took a taxi and it took me hours to recover from the ride. Ugh! It also took us hours to find the Mermelles beach, which when we found it was beautiful! It’s very excluded, and the path to it is obscure (which is why we walked around for about two hours before we found it!).. But once down there, it was worth it. There was almost no one there, and going into it felt so good, it was not dirty like the first public beach i went to, and it was not full ocean crud like the second one I went to. Third time’s a charm! When I got back to my house, surprise surprise, Jesse had come back into town for the night! So she and I hung out and watched Office Space. Ulisse and Samba dropped by and said hi. Unfortunately, the couldnt watch the movie very well cuz it was hard to hear it and well I don’t have any speakers to attach the sound to.
Sunday was fabulous, got up and out to Jane’s house to watch the kids. Kelly and I are so grateful to even just have a nice air conditioned house to be in for a few hours with American food. The kids were a bit cranky, but they didn’t sleep well and poor Tanner was sick. We also took care of Joel and Owen, who are pretty good. I felt so bad when Joel accidentally hit Tanner with a toy, and I thought he did it on purpose (that’s what it looked like), so I had Joel come over and say he was sorry and he just started bawling. And I ask Joel what was wrong, and I picked him up and comforted him and after awhile, I asked if it had been an accident and he said yes, he really didn’t mean to. He’s a very sensitive boy, but so very sweet!
After that, I met up with Rebecca to go take a look at her apartment (I’m apartment hunting), it’s up in Yoff. She’s really nice, and I got to know her really well. She’s laidback and she’s done a lot of traveling. She used to live in Zinguinchor, but she’s now making her base here in Senegal. The place was really nice. We basically spent the entire afternoon looking at it and getting to know each other. I came home and found out Julia had been to visit me, so I went back over to her place and we hung out for awhile. It rained some last night, and stormed a bit, but the cool air was a welcome break from the overwhelming heat! I kept my door open as long as possible to get a nice cool breeze in my room. Well that’s it for now! A bientot inchalla!
