Scatterbrained in Senegal

Hey ya'll, so you might be thinking what now? More specifically, after I've shamelessly recounted my moments of klumsiness and poor decision making you might think to yourself, she's probably learned her lesson by now. Well, not yet, but that's the great thing about Senegal, I learn something new everyday. Unfortunately, last Monday I accidentally left my wallet at the dining hall after breakfast. An hour later when I realized my mistake and returned to grab it someone had "borrowed" my wallet from it's lovely place on the table. Later that day I talked to about 10 different people who had interacted with my wallet and had eventually passed it to my roommate. Fortunately, no one stole any of my identity cards or important stuff, but they did grab a hefty sum of money, which hurt a bit to find out. Lessons I learned, but kind of already knew: 1. don't carry that much money around with you, duh! 2. Be careful with your possessions, knew that... 3. Money is useful and I want to be wise with how I use it, but I don't need much to get by: I lived off of $2.50 between monday and friday last week.

I'm going to interrupt my ramble about losing money to share the fact that as I was sitting here typing that last paragraph a truck drove into the building I'm currently sitting in. Our computer room is on the second floor of the library and I when I looked out the window to see what made an incredibly loud and crashlike noise, I noticed a large truck lodged in the side of the building directly below me. I'm not sure what the driver was thinking, but having had some incidents while driving myself I feel his pain. More importantly, I got a nice photo of the view from our window using the camera on the top of my laptop.

Besides all the usual hullabaloo of trucks hitting buildings and stuff I've been keeping a pretty low profile lately. That sounds kind of shady, what I meant is that since I have less money I've been keeping to campus and hanging out with my roommate, reading lots of books, and writing various papers. Classes are really confusing at the moment because the political science department is taking "exams," but then we have exams again in June for the same classes or something, and all the other departments are starting their second semester. As usual I feel a little lost in it all, plus we're trying to plan what to take next year at Madison. Spring break is theoretically next week, and a few of us were hoping to visit southern Senegal, but I seem to have a class scheduled during the break so I'm not sure how that will work out. Hopefully the professor will realize that you don't have classes during spring break! Another reason for the low profile is because Sunday was election day in Senegal. When I tried to figure out what offices were on the ballot I was told that they were voting for every mayor in Senegal. Hmm, I think there was probably more to it than that, but I can't be sure. From what I saw, most of the campaigning involved people driving around in cars with pictures of the candidates taped to the side and men sitting on top of the cars screaming things through a megaphone. Plus, last weekend the President travelled all around the country and I heard the crowds were a little rowdy. Our friend and shepherd Ousmane told us not to go into town this past Saturday and Sunday because it wasn't safe. Even though Senegal is a fairly functioning democracy, you never really know what can happen because of how unstable the surrounding countries are. It appears that the in the election the President's party lost in every province, which I assume will leave him as a bit of a lame duck. In Wolof class our teacher shared that he thinks the President should step down from power since he no longer has the support of the people; plus he told us that the President lost because he wanted to appoint his son the office after him.

This weekend I got to hang out with some Senegalese friends that are really great. One of my friends goes by the name, Afrika, I think because he is very pro-African rights, but his real name is Daodad. Afrika generously whipped my butt in scrabble, which I need to look into because I was never aware of these things called "scrabble words" that are two/three letter words that don't really exist. Sunday after church I spent the day with Noa and his family who invited me for lunch. Although Noa is a little crazy it was a lot of fun and I feel total comfortable around his family. Oh, and I feasted on warthog again, yummy!

That's a bit of what's new over here in the desert! My roommate Juliette is as wonderful as ever. Especially Sunday night when I got home around 10 and noticed that we had an infestation of fruit flies. After cleansing the room of various fruit items I learned that Juliette has a severe phobia of insects and she proceeded to walk around our room covering her face. Yesterday I spent a nice chunk of the morning spraying toxic chemicals throughout our room and cleaning up the mess! Have a great week :)