le voyage en afrique

written 17 january 2022

So after landing in Paris, I had 8 hours to kill. Ironically I sat next to a girl who was also in my program but we didn’t realize it until we got off the plane. Together, we lapped the airport many many times and took turns napping. Finally, we boarded our next flight to Dakar.

Once we landed we had to fill out COVID arrival forms on the plane. I’m not sure how it happened but somehow everyone in my row asked me to fill out their form for them (as the only non-native language speaker and youngest person in my row, still not sure why…), but I was too tired/didn’t really know how to argue. So I took their passports and filled out the form as best I could. They had to put their destination city which wasn’t on their passport, but I had no idea to spell what they were telling me so I just sounded it out. Hopefully it wasn’t a critical form because there are now a few newly named Senegalese cities.

As we traversed through the airport we slowly added more students to our group when we heard any 20-year-old speaking English. There are 14 of us total in the program.

During customs, the agent kept asking me a question that I had never heard of, but I finally figured out he was asking me about my middle name “Faye.” He was convinced I was part-Senegalese because I guess that name is popular here. (Today the woman at the bank also commented on the name when she saw my passport, so now I know that it is indeed a common name here, so the surprise makes sense). Anyway after I explained my family history he finally let me go through.

Herding 14 people through the airport takes a while so after about 2 hours we finally made it out. The airport is located about an hour outside of Dakar so we had a bit of a drive. Since it was dark, at first it looked exactly the same as the Midwest with rest stops and Christmas decorations along the way. The white sand even looked like snowbanks in the dark! I fell asleep, but when I woke up we were in the middle of Dakar with motorcycles substituting flashlights for headlights, men in long shirts, and horses and cows roaming the streets.

We arrived at our apartment building and nothing really worked correctly at first. 3 students got locked out of their apartment, so had to sleep in our living room with towels. Our electricity went out (I know where the breaker is now), and our water didn't work. But our landlord is very accommodating so by morning everything was fixed. Today I figured out that we also didn’t have half our furniture because items keep magically appearing in our apartment. We finally fell asleep in our new home.