That's another one of those fun little greeting phrases that I don't know how to respond to. First of all, am I eating my money??? Second of all, I think it means are you doing well enough that you can eat well and be happy. Thirdly, I always feel weird when people ask me that, because when I say, "Yep, it's going good," I feel like people are thinking oh we know you rich American. But on the other hand, if I say, "I have no money," which is fairly truthful considering I have no job and am supported by my parents, people are thinking that I'm a liar. I guess it's a lose lose situation, but a good example of my social interaction here on campus where I spend a lot of my time just smiling and pretending I didn't understand the question.
Wow, ok, so that last paragraph just sounded a little emo/like I don't have any friends so let me fill you in on what i've been up to the last few days. At the moment, I'm trying to write a new blog entry, but there's a horde of what appears to be 5-10 year old children running around the room playing drums. They're pretty cute, but a little distracting. Last week I attended a few classes, which is always interesting here because you have to sometimes hover in the vicinity of the professor's office and follow him to the classroom because they often change the location of the class. This really isn't a problem for most of my classes, except for my French class, which really consists of me and two other American girls attending, mostly at random, as many of the classes taught by one professor as possible. A few weeks ago, he gave us a general test to see our level, and now we're attending almost all of his classes to get our credit hours, and then at the end he'll make another test for us. All in all, it's one of the more unorthodox classes I've ever had, and is sometimes more difficult than just taking a specific class. More specifically, last week this professor was gone, and he had another prof filling in for him. Unfortunately, we don't know what this new professor looks like, and he changed the classroom so we spent several hours wandering around campus trying to find our class and later his office.
In my socio-anthropology of the economy class, we gave a presentation on the economic crisis on Thursday during class. I thought the presentation went well, and our professor seemed to think we did well enough, but one of the students asked to borrow our paper and said we should have him edit it next time... I honestly don't think the professor expects us to be perfect, but we'll see. Besides the presentation, my other classes were fairly uneventful. I thought I made an appointment to see one of my professors in his office, but when I went there on Tuesday neither he nor his secretary were there. Fortunately, when I returned on Thursday, the man I made an appointment with was there, and I realized that he was not my professor, which was slightly awkward.
Outside of classes I've been rehearsing with the Church choir = my friend Noah and I. We have rehearsal every Saturday at 4pm. It's really fun rehearsing and getting to know Noah. He's a pretty good singer, and I...am not. At one point he told me he wished he could brush my throat with oil; I'm not really sure what that meant, but he told me it had something to do with the fact that I can't hold a pitch. Sunday during church our choir debuted, but Noah's dad didn't realize that the point of the choir was to lead the hymns and such so he did it himself. That wasn't really a problem last week though because I forgot most of the songs anyways. Besides choir I found a small little Bible study group on campus that meets once a week. We've had two meetings so far, in which we covered the same material because most people didn't show up last week. They seem like a nice group, but a little light on the number of girls. When they asked me if I had any questions the only thing I could think of was, "are there other girls?" and they all laughed and then were kinda like, sometimes.
Saturday morning my roommate Juliette and I watched the movie fight club. For those of you who've seen it, it's kind of an intense/strange movie, but Juliette told me she likes complex and horror films, so I figured she's like it. I'm not really sure what she thought of the movie, but she's been a little strange since...not sure there's a correlation but if I see her beating up people more often than before I'll look into it.
Friday I went to a tailor to get some fun Senegalese clothes made, and a pair of linen pants, so when I go back this week we'll see how I look. Depending on the result I'll post pictures. I was inspired to get the clothes made because some of Juliette's friends kept asking me why I wasn't wearing a booboo on Friday, apparently everyone does. Not sure how I missed that memo. This week has just been kinda rollin by with classes and filling out forms about our classes for Madison. So far the hardest part about being here in Senegal besides missing family and friends has been trying to fit the University in Saint-Louis into an American credit system. I know it'll work out, but it's always a little crazy! Ba benen leen (next time guys)!
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3 comments:
How about telling them that you are a student and students don't have money?
i've done that many times, and sometimes it works after i explain to them that school in the u.s. is much more expensive/people have to take out loans (which they don't understand)/they have scholarships. it's just one of those culture/minority differences that makes being here a completely different experience from spending a year in Europe
Perhaps one of the reasons school is more expensive here is because we actually conduct classes with professors here! That would seem to be one of those cultural/minority differences!
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