Alright, so I've gotten a bit behind on
my blog since I haven't had internet for the past couple of
days/randomly fell asleep on the couch for a little bit too
long...(product of overeating I assure you).
I'll give you a re-cap of each day and
touch upon the most important parts. Sorry you guys are missing out
on the details but its late and I'm sleepy lol.
I last left off writing on Thursday,
which happened to be my least favorite day since my time here. I have
a particularly annoying class on Tue/Thu taught by a Senegalese
professor that speaks terribly fast french and has no structure.
Perhaps there is nothing more frightening for one's educational
entegrity than taking an anth class in French when the prof lacks
structure entirely. His teaching mostly constituted scribbling
incessantly on the white board while mumbling to himself. After
awhile, his scribbles began to overlap and everything was
unintelligible—a mix of french accents, circles, and a makeshift
map of West Africa. Needless to say I learned close to nothing in
that class and am hoping my next class with him will be better (I
have him tomorrow). Thus, with this being the best part of my day I
assume you can understand why I might consider the rest of my day to
be quite annoying. After French we were paired up with our language
partners and met them for the first time. My Language partner's name
is Viviane and her bright red rain coat stood out to me more than
anything—since it's like 70 out. She was very well put together and
cutsie and we chatted a bit about the clubs here in Senegal and what
the dance scene was like. I of course had no choice but to break a
move and she laughed at my american moves (which for the record are
really just Marissa moves). We exchanged numbers and later on she
sent me a txt wishing me a good night, today (monday) she said hi
again so I'm glad she's trying to put in a little effort. I'll try to
meet up with her this week sometime but we've yet to hang out. In all
honesty, the fact that Viviane turned out to be a girl was quite a
fortunate circumstance. Apparently the language partner concept is a
bit confusing for some senegalese men as they had previously
perceived it to be an American dating service. Apparently they're
some rather persistent ones—one girl told me her language partner
had called her 9 time this morning (monday)--and other have told me
their language partners have already confessed profound feelings of
love. Oh Senegalese men, they lack sport entirely. Which is a whole
'nother subject worth mentioning...
Later on that day I had a really shitty
panini at this 'american-style' restaurant named Ceaser's here and
decided I would avoid eating there at all costs. I also had to walk
home alone which took me about 45min. Unpleasant to say the least.
When I actually arrived home my family didn't really chat with me and
I was worried they were mad at me for being out so much and
relatively late. Partly it's school's fault—I go in at 9 and get
out at 4:30pm LONG DAYS—and partly my exploration tendencies.
Still, dinner was a bit cold in that every time I left the table my
family started talking and when I returned they would slip back into
complete silence.
Friday
was much better and consisted of several new experiences. Oy I'm
running out of time to write this! Ok well, it was the first day of
my internship at RHADDO and I worked for about 9-12:30pm. We were
given our first assignments, which will apparently consist of two
research papers evaluating the cause and trend of violence throughout
the elections/before and after and the current violence occurring in
the Cassamance. The Cassamance will prove to be harder to investigate
as news that comes from there has the tendency to be skewed, painting
the rebels negatively without a two-sided perspective of the story,
and so we are in charge of obtaining valid sources—interesting to
say the least! I want to get my hands a bit dirty so I'm hoping they
give us work beyond the theoretical exercises, although I'm terribly
appreciative of the chance to write over these subjects. They also
offered to possibly publish the work so I'll be working towards that
objective. Wifi wasn't working throughout the time so the work effort
was relatively stunted, going in tomorrow and hopefully it'll be
better.
I'm
going to stop writing here for now, as it's getting a bit late. I'm
going to go ahead and post this bit because I've been keeping you
guys waiting for so long, but hopefully I'll have the chance to
finish the rest of the blog post later. So expect the full post as an
edited version with all 5 days should appear later on today.
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