Au Senegal, sain et sauf.

I'm here! I'm exhausted and a little overstimulated and my feet are dirty, but I'm fed and hydrated and comfortable and can understand people when they speak to me.

We, those of us on the group flight from New York, including André, our program director, and myself, got into Dakar around 6 AM this morning. It blows my mind that that was just this morning. Josephine, Waly, and Awa, the WARC staff, met us with a bus and took us to a hotel where we had breakfast, showers and naps. After that, we headed to the home of a woman who used to/sort of still does work at WARC and spent the rest of the day doing orientation kind of things. Here's how to eat properly, this is some Senegalese music, this is how you tie a skirt properly, this is what tea tastes like with TONS of sugar in it, these are the things that you should do with your host family (greet everyone in the morning even if you're grouchy and tell them where you're going when you're not going to be home), these are the things that you shouldn't do with your host family (let them see your underwear and eat by yourself in your room). We also took a walk to the beach.

There are about 80 million things that I could write about here (staircases to no where on the side of the road, stray goats, boys nonchalantly urinating in public, Wolof greetings, printed waxed fabric, calls to prayer, the weather . . .) but I am going to go to bed instead. Tomorrow we sign up for our classes and move in with our host families, so it's going to be a big day. I'm not sure when I'll be back to update, but my guess is that it's not going to be until next week. Until then, au revoir.