First Week of Classes

Well, today marks the end of my first week of classes. I’m pretty exhausted. Most days I have class from 9 am – 6 pm with an hour break for lunch. There is a lot to catch up on Senegalese history, relations, ect. before we can dive into our specific topics of choice to best understand the context we will work in. We’ll finish up one class in 3 weeks so I’m hoping that the material will slow down a bit.

Our class schedule.

I also began taking Wolof classes which I really enjoy. The teacher is awesome. His name is Sedy (pronounced C.D.). He’s taught Wolof for many years in the peace corps so he understands how to best approach the language. Yesterday, we went on a field trip to a microfinancing institution (for my finance class) which was super interesting. On the way home, we got stuck in traffic, so my classmate and I decided to try and speak Wolof with the cab driver. We pulled out our Wolof notebooks and managed to ask his name and figure out where he was from. With a mixture of Wolof, French, and English we managed to have a brief 3 minute conversation.. 2 days of immersion can do a lot! At the end of our cab ride, our teacher (who was in another taxi, came over to pay). She told us he said he loved me and offered for me to be his wife. My first proposal.

The microfinance center we visited

Since today is Friday, everyone is super dressed up. In Wolof, Friday is called "Juma" which is also the word for mosque, because on Fridays at 4 pm all of the Muslims go to the juma (instead of the neighborhood mosque called a jàkka) to pray and interact with each other. It's fun to look at all of the colors of clothing in the streets.

The upside to having 8 hours of class per day in French is that I no longer wake up to the prayer call and rooster during the night.

We have two papers due next week and several articles to read so this weekend will be devoted to homework.

As I write this someone just came up to me and started speaking Wolof, so that makes my second successful conversation (I cut if off before a proposal this time), only kind of kidding. But I honestly feel very safe as there are always lots of people around, it just always takes me by surprise.

Since I only went to school I didn’t take many pictures, but perhaps next week :)