Dagana oh Dagana

Book: The Chosen by Chaim Potok,
A Million Little Pieces,
The Book of Guys,
The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen
and my French book is Ma Babouche Pour Toujours. (Don’t ask me what that means. I still need a dictioinary.) Alisa I think that you would really like “The Chosen” if you haven’t read it and Lea you will also like it, but only if you follow through with Birth Right.
Song: Since Your Gone, Josh Ritter. It makes me laugh. Thanks Katie!

Ten ways you know you are in Senegal.
10: You feel like you have accomplished something if you leave the house and have a conversation.
9: You see a concave of trucks everyday with loud speakers cruising the streets. Sometimes they yell about the President, play music, or promote a phone company.
8: You only have the option to buy one product because there is only one company that makes the product.
7: You pay the hotel by the hour. (Hotels are popular in factory towns.)
6: You know you really shouldn’t jump in the river and swim because of shisto, but decide to do it anyways.
5: You see a large truck where the entire side is open and has pictures of soup cubes and there are over a hundred women with their yellow buckets clapping to the music waqiting for free soup cubes.
4: You hear someone say that Djiby is a good dancer. He dance Senegalese.
3: You get a thorn stuck in your foot every other step.
2: You walk into all the women in the family sitting in a semi circle two feet away from the TV watching Spanish soap operas and yelling at the TV.
1: You get to sit on the same stage as the presidents wife just because you wonder on it and no one says anything to you. Yeah I’m a celebrity in Senegal. On the news and everything.

Which is a good intro to my story. We will call it Djibi’s crazy day in Richard Toll. So a few days ago I get a text message from my neighbor to the West to come to Toll and meet the President’s wife. She will be talking about AIDs and prevention. I say well I will think about it and see what I have planned on that day. Two days later I get another text saying, “Djiby, I got us an invite to a BBQ with the UN.” They work for the United Nations refugee program. When I hear this I say well I guess I can make an effort to come into town and do this. I get up at seven in the morning, make myself an omelet sandwich get on my bike by seven thirty and head on down the road. I get to Toll Just as Bryn is leaving and we immediately head to the site where the First Lady will be speaking. Once we get their we find her supervisor who is also the assistant mayor. He grabs us puts us in the truck with him and we go run some errands. It is interesting to note that this guy will most likely be the next mayor of Richard Toll, and he was picking up tee shirts, delivering ribbons for decorations and picked up the podium. In the US a person would be hired on to do all of these smaller jobs, but not here. We ran around like chickens with our heads cut off and finally arrived at the spot where she was going to speak. The supervisor tells us to go to the stage and sit. So we find a good spot in the middle, two rows behind where the First Lady will sit and we wait. After everything fills up they start to add some extra chairs to the stage because they were a few short. Then finally she arrives and we are two rows behind her for the entire time. Oh yeah, the two white people behind her on the news, one of them was me. People told me they saw me. I am special. After the speech she takes off and we head back to the apartment to hang out before the dinner.
The dinner was great, they cooked a lamb on a grill, and a chicken. We also had onions as our side dish. Yes you heard me right, the dinner was meat and onion sauce. No salad, no fries, but it was very American style since we all got our own plates and a knife. There really is a technique to eating with a hand and a knife. For dessert we had watermelon. I can’t even explain how much watermelon I have been eating. It is less than a dollar for an entire melon so I have been buying them for gifts and eating it for breakfast.
As far as work goes I have been going to the Center of Formation for the Femme, which means they teach English, French, Accounting, Management, and some other professional things. The Senegalese government and the Luxembourg government run it. The problem is that they are out of funding to run the program so maybe in a few months I can try to help get funding or help make them self funded which has been a big crutch from them so far.
That is all form the other side of the Atlantic. By the way, please send me mail, it makes my day.
I decided to add this on at the end because this is all fresh information. I had one of my best moments and one of my worst moments all in the same day. Today I decided to make a way to hold my mosquito net up. I went and found used tomato cans, thrown away bed frame, and cement to build my apparatus. The reason I am so proud of this was that I have never mixed concert before and the entire time I was I had a group of workers who at the same time were using concrete, just watching me. They spoke under their breath and laughed at what I was doing. The great thing was when I finished one guy came over took a look pointed one thing out to me and told me I did a good job. Now for the worst time, I had to pay rent to my host dad for the month. I knew I was going to be out of town for a few days so I decided I tried to explain I would pay a little less for the days I was going to miss. Rather than discussing it he yelled, brought everyone in the family into my room, told me we were family and I should pay the money I need to. This isn’t a hotel I don’t just pay for the meals. So after getting yelled at for by my host mom and host dad, I realized they had all of this work done on the house and couldn’t pay it until I gave them all the money. I’m just writing this to get it of my chest. I love it here in Senegal and when I notice my language improves or I get invited to peoples house to eat and drink tea. I know that it is worth being here and it is going to be rough at times.
Love
Josh (Djiby)