Back in Kaolack

and back in the land of mosquitos...in January--no good!

Loaded down with chocolate and about 600 digital pictures, I arrived back in Dakar Thursday night, on a flight with two other Health PCVs from my Stage, and we were immediately welcomed back to Senegal by chaos at baggage claim (though honestly, not that different from O’Hare) and super aggressive taxi drivers trying to overcharge us and give us rides back to the PC House. I was able to shock many of the drivers, successfully making many of them believe that I actually speak Wolof, bargaining about price or shooing them off as necessary. The driver who finally gave us a good price was quite impressed with me for being so tough, haha. One punk grabbed my earring and proclaimed his love for me as we walked to our driver’s car—Jerk. Yep, we’re back in Senegal.

Friday morning, after a quick trip to the PC Office, another PCV and I made the treck to Kaolack. I needed to buy my family a few gifts (kola nuts, tea, vegetables, and a baby outfit for a newborn), do some computer work (yea Sereer dictionary), and generally decompress and mentally prepare myself before returning to the village on Monday morning (it’s a pain to head back to the village on Sundays). After extensively cleaning my hut, the activities of the week will be visiting people, distributing gifts (and declining demands from other people for gifts from Europe—not looking forward to that), checking on my garden, hopefully outplanting some seedlings from my backyard to the school garden (if the fence is up), making sure I have a functional fence in my yard, and getting back into the swing of things again. Thursday starts the ENORMOUS 4-day wrestling tournament in my village, of which I will be there for one day before returning to Kaolack for our Regional Strategy Retreat (more on that next weekend) and then my birthday. Tuesday will officially be 10 months In Country…can you believe it?!! I can’t…the next Stage comes in 1.5 months…weird!

Also, pictures are updated, so just click to the link to the left to see pics from my trip and this past fall.