Juroom benni semain - 6 weeks

Being here is no longer something new. Walks along the fume-choked Route d'Ouakam have lost their awe, and the scenes of daily life along the sandy streets of Mermoz have ceased to fill me with delighted surprise. Even the tickling thrill of an unexpected French encounter beside a fruit stand or boutique has drained away, and I'm quite settled into the daily comments and chores of my host family. For the greater part, I fill my days sitting in classes, eating fruits, working on emails, waiting on benches, walking from place to place.

In short, I've broken into the routine of everyday life. And shockingly, it turns out to have a similar feel, even though I'm living in such a distant place, within such a different culture. Sometimes I even get bored, believe it or not!

Why oh why did I wait until now to begin a blog?? I can only dodge personal responsibility and lay blame upon my irrational and contrary objection to the newest technological fads. But now I'm well beyond my initial thrill and first avid, breathless descriptions. I've lived through, without documentation, my great crash of confidence and subsequent battle with digestive malfunction. What I now have to write about is more... complicated. I'm trying to organize my daily life, finish papers and applications for internships, trying to put my finger on what it is that I'm just not getting. I'm trying somehow to break a surface that I cannot describe. (below: Oranges du pays in my back courtyard)

It was witnessing the undoubtable success of several of my friends' blogs that finally conquered my cynical resistance. Their crisp, colourful entries, laid out neatly beside illustrative photographs, have trumped my scraps of journal paper and photocopied letters. In theory, this blog will make me organize my experiences and lay them out coherently. Hopefully, if I can explain them to you, they'll make sense to me as well.

An introduction? I'm here in Senegal through the CIEE Study Center on the Sufflk University Dakar Campus. The program itself is pretty straight forward: we choose 15 hours of classes, live with host families, take excursions. Not quite the romance of the SIT or MSID programs, with months out in the field and a grand independant project, but hopefully I'll be able to work a little of that in on my own. So, I'm picking up Wolof, trying to polish my French, and begin to understand how this world works. So, despite my fierce, indignant resistance, here it is: a blog on my 9 months in Senegal.