Hi all! Just a quick note to let you know I'm safely in Senegal. It was quite an adventure to get here, starting with my Detroit to Philadelphia flight being canceled. But it wouldn't be Peace Corps without testing our flexibility from the very beginning!
We landed in Dakar, Senegal on Wednesday afternoon and were then driven to the Peace Corps training center in Thiès (pronounced kind of like Chess but with a z sound on the end) which will be our home base over the next 9 weeks. Starting next week, we'll be leaving the training center in small groups of about 4-5 people to do intensive language training sessions. I still don't know where I'll be permanently placed within the country, but once we get assigned a language to learn then I'll at least know the region where I will be based. We haven't done any language study yet but I'm getting eager to learn. My French has come in handy a few times though :)
From Wednesday until today we were confined to the compound that houses our training center. For security reasons, the Peace Corps staff doesn't allow new volunteers to leave the compound until we've been given some basic safety and security instructions, and then given a guided tour of the city. SO, today we finally got to leave the compound and take a tour of Thiès, something I'd been eager to do since we got here!
I had all of these visualizations about what the city would look like outside of our gated compound, and none of them compared to the real thing. Pictures to come in the near future, but for now I'll just say there's lots to take in and a lot to learn about this new culture. We did stop in a Bon Marche, the stomping grounds for people buying Western food and toiletries (for my study abroad friends, you would have loved this place! It was just like France, and I found SO many things I remembered loving in Rouen!). I think visits to Thiès in the future will be accompanied with a stop here to stock up on comfort food - good to identify this place early on!
More pictures and details of my new life to come soon!
