Keepin busy

Salut mes amis!

Sorry it's been a while, i've been trying to keep busy, although that is sometimes more of a psychological state of busy than a physical busy. Classes have been rolling along the last few weeks, with a minor hiccup on monday and tuesday of this week when students went on strike over scholarships. Fortunately, the scholarship problems were quickly resolved and I didn't really miss any classes besides Wolof because my professor planned to be absent on Tuesday anyways. Most of my classes are pretty laid back, where I can write a paper for most of my grade, but one of my classes is turning out to be a real thorn in my side. The class is socio-anthropology of the economy, which is a long title for a class that is basically about the fact that people aren't total selfish participants in the economy but a product of society. I know that doesn't sound too complicated but we turned in paper friday morning that alerted me to the fact that I had no clue as to what is going on in the class. Ok, I might be exaggerating a little because the paper itself was a bit of a fiasco. This is the same class in which I recently gave a presentation on the economic crisis, and we thought the paper wouldn't be too bad since our presentation went well. Unfortunately, one of the Americans with me got malaria about a week ago and on top of that, as we recently realized, some parasitic infection. Consequently, she was really down for the count and couldn't help too much with the paper. Plus, thursday night when were supposed to putting together the various sections of our paper, one of the other Americans a horrible nose bleed and had to go back to her room because she felt faint. Obviously, health wise were kinda in rough shape, but that left one other girl and I to put the entire 10 page paper together, and I enjoyed my first late night/early morning study party in Africa. To top it off, the printer decided to not work and place a strip of white in the middle of our paper on each side. Hence, I'm a little nervous about this class in which I have the exam next week...Oh, and the girl with malaria is doing much better now, practically good as new.

One more point of interest about my classes, in our Wolof class the teacher told us Friday that we were the farthest behind than any of his previous classes = we're the worst at Wolof. I have had several responses to that statement because from an academic standpoint, my grade in the class is fine so it's hard to judge by that. But I do understand what he means because my speaking ability is pretty weak. It's just kind of frustrating because he was voicing one of the thoughts constantly going through my head, "why am I so bad at Wolof/why don't i practice speaking it more often." He is also hitting on deeper issues like how we're finding it challenging to make friends, and my friendships are really coming slowly but surely but comments like that make it hard to keep morale up sometimes.

Enough about that kind of stuff because I've been up to alot of positive things lately. First of all, last weekend we visited a nature reserve about an hour and a half from campus which is home to hundreds of birds. If you know me well, you know that I was lacking enthusiasm for this specific trip because of my irrational fear of birds, but the trip turned out to be great. To be honest, the highlight of the trip for me was the vehicle we took out to the bird park, which was a car rapide that Ousmane hired for us. On the back of the car (more like van) there was a ladder and a ledge where someone usually stands calling out the route of the car and helping passengers on and off the car. Furthermore, because the road to the park was not paved and full of potholes the driver moved at a pace of about 5 miles an hour most of the time, which left me free to climb out on the back and enjoy the ride from a different perspective. I had a bunch of fun hanging off the back of the car, especially when I noticed Ousmane, his wife Aminata, and the driver pointing at me and shaking their heads like I was crazy. The only downside of the outdoor seating was that my entire body was coated with a thick layer of dust, including my contacts. I'll move onto the bird park itself because that's probably more interesting to you guys. The park is a small little river/marsh area with nicely constructed motor boats that take you out on about at 2 hour long tour of the body of water smack dab in the middle of nowhere. As far as the birds are concerned, I only saw about four different species, the majority of them being massive pelicans. I think there were probably a few thousand pelicans in all, which were pretty cool to watch scooping fish out of the water.

The trip to the bird park was pretty fun, and on the way home I was on the lookout for groups of monkeys because of a ridiculous story I heard about when Ariel and Elise previously visited the park. More specifically, during their journey to the park, their taxi driver made a wrong turn and started heading through the desert to Mauritania. Apparently, at one point they saw a group of monkeys running alongside their taxi, which I think is one of the most hilarious images I can think of and I was hoping to see some monkeys myself. As a side note, it's probably good that I didn't see any monkeys because that would have indicated that we were traveling the wrong direction, and because Ariel and Elise's previous trip included them screaming for the driver to stop because they were heading towards men with large guns guarding the border to Mauritania.

Sorry, I'm gonna run off to dinner now but I'll finish tomorrow.