10 days wiser...

Whew. "Demystification."
What a word for what we just experienced. The new PC term for it is CBT - Community-Based Training, but I guess you could say that I have been demystified in many ways, after spending the last week plus with a current volunteer, shadowing her work and meeting her community. With everything we did and the time we spent there, it's hard to express how the days seemed to stretch on and on, slowly melting into each other with a timelessness that was intensified by the heat and the constant concentration required to interact in a different community in a new language. Monday felt like Saturday, Thursday could have been Sunday, and each day there seemed to be so set apart from what we were used to, the community in itself seeming isolated from the rest of the world, existing alone in the desert heat. After a few days the whole town knew our names, our new names that is, the second round of names we've been given here in country, and I admit now that as difficult as it was to feel like we were thrown into a new situation just as we were getting comfortable in our first one, I feel more ready now to go to my site and start feeling comfortable there.

This week I bought my first few meters of Senegalese fabric, danced at a tam-tam while wearing a borrowed Wolof outfit, complete with headwrap, tried to bargain for produce at a weekly market, and helped facilitate a session on mosquito net dipping for the town (with some small success). Most of the week it was between 98 and 100 degrees F, only cooling down slightly each night, and most of my pocket money went towards buying boissons fraiches at the town butiks. On the day where there was nothing cold in the fridge because the electricity was down, I came back to the house with two cans of pineapple chunks to share between us after our hot lunch of fish and rice, and we laughed as the five of us passed around the cans and savored the semi-cool juice.

Now that we're back in Thiès, I realize I did a lot of complaining, but overall those days were positive ones, and helped to reassure me that I will indeed be able to handle myself when I get to site. This last week also is making me appreciate all the more the luxury of sitting here to write this with air conditioning blowing cool around me. Until the next time!