Orientation

(I feel like I should update every chance I get, since those chances will get less and less frequent this week especially)

It feels like a week since I was in Minneapolis. I’ve had my first day of orientation with Waly, Ady and Awa, and it was a whirlwind. We learned how to dance, how to eat, how to drink tea, how to wear a pagne, and the individual jobs of the left vs. the right hand. We walked to the beach, then back through a fishing village, crowded with children chanting “toubab toubab toubab” and women in bright skirts and horses and carts and fancy cars and piles of rotting fish half buried in the sand between the brightly painted boats and the whole thing stinks of salt and fish and rotting flesh and horse manure and you hear people singing and shouting and I can’t tell if the men are hissing at the horses or at us and I don’t know if it’s a gesture of approval or of disapproval. I saw an old man in a bright lime green shirt sitting on a chair, a younger man on the ground polishing his nails with a rag. Kids decorate every wall with drawings, scribbles, whole scenes that go on for blocks at a time. I wink at them when they stare at me- those that aren’t asking for money. Families live in houses that look like ruins, until you’re told they’re not finished yet. As soon as they can afford the next layer of bricks, they’ll continue construction. There are stands that sell batteries and cell phones and bright green lettuce and very dusty pairs of shoes. There’s a man with dreds dressed in rags, but the rags look like some sort of costume instead, they’re just perfectly sewn strips of fabric.

I’ve started to feel comfortable understanding conversations and answering them in french. I’ve started to learn how to walk in sand so that it doesn’t fly up in my face, and so that I can try and avoid so much piling into the toe of my sandal. It doesn’t work, of course, but I’m making progress.

And I learned just how strong you can make green Chinese tea with mint. And how difficult it is to form a rice ball with just your right hand, well enough that it reaches your mouth without making a mess. And tomorrow we’re getting cell phones and changing currency and I’m so exhausted right now I think I’ll just go to sleep.