It's been awhile

Hey everyone!  I realize that it has been awhile since I have posted, but in our last hotel I did try several times and it would never save.  I will try to post a few more blogs with themes so that I can catch you up on everything that has been going on, but this one will be general.

We spent a week in Dakar, and it was a busy one!  We were always heading somewhere, we had a lot of classes and meeting set up with students and some of the biggest African authors, plus there were cultural experiences to have.  Everything has been wonderful, the food is good, truth be told we eat a lot of French breads and pastries in the morning and lunches are sandwiches, we eat a fair amount of chicken and rice.  Nothing really crazy, yet, the oddest has been that the fishes aren't served like home, meaning the head is still attached.

Yesterday we had a very long day.  We drove from Dakar to Saint Louis, which was at least eight hours on the bus, but in the middle of the day we stopped in Touba to see one of the biggest and prettiest mosques in Africa.  It was fun, and we ate with the Mourides, but they were extrememy welcoming, meaning that they took us around their center for hours in the heat.  But we were grateful for the yummy lunch and their kindness.

Saint Louis is smaller than Dakar, haven't really gotten to know it yet as we've been here all of twelve hours and seven of those were in bed.  It seems like it's a cool place and we will be here about two weeks before heading to the interior of the country.

I am not able to get as many on here as I was hoping, sorry...

Dakar and traffic, it's intense

Random kids on the street

over looking the city and the Atlantic

fish head

Melanie and I eating lunch

This is the library for the litterature, super small!  Very humbling when compared to the Harold B. Lee Library

many classes at the university are standing room only, approx. 100,000 students attend

a bus

I am trying to make the same face

a hippo mask, for those who worry at SU!

Flag on the boat to Gorée

Gorée

the door of no return at the house of slaves

Coca-light in Arabic, like my friend Maren said, it just tastes better than Diet Coke

Gorée

Boubou and ukelele (not African, the instument that is)

students

I hope all is well with all of you!  God bless

Voici l'Agrique

Me upon arrival

Dakar Airport

Suunrise

going to hotel

 Bonjour tout le monde,

We made it safely and relatively quickly to Senegal.  We landed early in New York and landed early in Dakar.  Mindy, Brayden, and myself had a fun experience on the flight across the ocean.  We were seated by a girl from Canada that was headed to Senegal to do some volunteer work as part of her major when she started to ask questions.  We were able to teach a sort of first lesson and give her a copy of the Book of Mormon.  It was a lot of fun to have a missionary experience again and to bear testimony.  It was a cool thing to see the African coast illuminated against the dark ocean and dark night sky as we approached we were able to perfectly see, due to city lights, the most western point of mainland Africa. We landed in Dakar and made it slowly through customs.  The hectic crowd of people pushing for bags and leaving was a bit unusual as nobody let you in, if anything they would push you out of the way, one needs to be a bit more aggressive her than back home.

After regrouping we met our bus and its drivers and headed to our hotel.  We drove through the city and along the coast where we saw several people beginning there exercises for the day; they would use logs to hold their feet for sit-ups, running, stretching, and I even saw a bench press using old tires as weights.  We made it to out hotel about 7:00am local time and then slept for a few hours before we held church services as a group in the hotel's conference room.  Church was a lot of fun and we were able to do it with the Smiley family that works at the U.S. Embassy in the State Department, and another girl doing a study abroad from Occidental College in L.A..  It was a lot of fun and the Spirit was strong during testimony meeting.

We then headed out to the city to walk around and to attempt to orient ourselves.  The people our super friendly!  Due to French colonization and European visitors we aren't really stared at, more just greeted and our searched out as customers.  There is a lot of cool stuff to buy and I will have to be wise in doing so.  Plenty of people were happy to happy to try and teach us Wolof words, which is their first language before French.  It is a pretty fun language.  After seeing the city we headed to a restaurant for some much needed food.  There were three dishes that we sort of shared.  Two with white rice and one with a red rice.  The meats were beef in one, chicken, in another, and fish in the third.  It looked scary, but tasted fantastic.  Towards the end of our meal the power went out, which is apparently rather common, but our hotel had power so when we returned from the restaurant, all was well.

I woke-up about an hour ago, 4:45am local time, and turned on the tv to discover the demise of Osama bin Laden.  While I am excited as an American for this long awaited report, I have to be happy that people tend to think we're European.  That being said, there is no reason to worry.  Senegal is a relatively peaceful country that does not harbor ant-American feelings and they do not support terrorists.  But when big events occur like the news from yesterday, it is not to have a buffer between those that may be upset.

more of my view

my room

view from my hotel

Dakar

Presidential Palace

Atlantic

End of dinner, beginning of power outage

Night view during outage

I'm leavin' on a jet plane...

Well folks, there you have it, all my supplies for the next six weeks are packed safely away in those three bags.  The big one is full of children's clothes that we will be donating and the small red carryon bag contains all the clothes I will be wearing, it is not a lot.

Tomorrow morning I will be joining up with the majority of my study abroad group from BYU as we head to Senegal!  I am so excited for this experience! I cannot wait to be in a French-speaking country again, but I am even more excited for the opportunity to go to Africa!  I feel so lucky and grateful to Mme Thompson and those at BYU that allowed me to apply, interview, and join this group more than two months after the deadline.  I just know that this will be an awesome opportunity to see even more of this beautiful world that we live in.

We takeoff at approximately 9:00am tomorrow, we will go to New York for a brief layover and then we will head directly to Dakar, Senegal.  We will land around 6:00am local time on Sunday, so about midnight in Utah with the six hour time difference.  And we will spend our Spring in the beautiful sunny weather that West Africa has to offer this time of year, a place where it will not snow on April 29th.

Just for the record, this is my first attempt at a blog so I apologize if it lacks.  We will have internet access, but the day will most likely vary so I make no promises on the upkeep.

Until next time, God bless.