Frapping la Rue

Friday morning I woke up at quarter to six in the morning, to the sound of a taxi honking. My mom had spent nearly an hour the previous night hunting down a taximan that would pick me up at 6:15, she'd finally found one, and he's half an hour early. I call Kaela, wake her up, we both rush out to the taxi, still early, it's pitch dark out. I call my mom from the taxi, then promptly leave my cell phone on the seat as I collect my stuff and we get out of the car. We arrive at WARC at 6:20, maybe, thank goodness the bus has already arrived because not even Waly's there yet. I am now without phone and without money and without sleep, but the third makes me too tired to be angry yet, just really really annoyed, and once Waly opens the gate we hang out in the courtyard and help load the fifty billion bottles of water onto the bus.

And then we're off. The whole way out of Dakar we're passing around little bags of pastries (three each) and fruit ( a banana and an apple and an orange each) and yogurt and juice (the kind that comes in a can and has little pieces of fruit in it... guava's my favorite so far) and we're all full to bursting which by this point is a constant. The drive takes six hours. At first, driving through the cities, I can sleep, or at least doze off. Once we get farther south though, the road gets bumpy. And by bumpy, I mean that first, the bus is bucking up and down. Then, we're zigzagging all over the road to avoid potholes, coming to abrupt stops to avoid other cars. Finally we end up driving half-on-half-off the road, or just on the grass half the time, because it's smoother and in better shape. Which is not, believe me, saying much.

Devyn threw up. (in a bag) There were a few students from Dakar who came with us, to visit their families and hang out with us at the hotel. A few were trying to practice their English. I was busy looking out the window at the African Savanna, because that's exactly what it was. Well, I'm no ecological expert. But lots of brown grass and the occasional baobab tree as far as you can see, with goats hangin' out in the brush? I think that's a savanna.

We drove by some villages, some bigger towns, a few cities. Saw lots of goats and sheep. Here the only difference between both cloven-hoofed animals is that the goats are cute and brown and the sheep are ugly and black and white. In my opinion. They don't have fluffy wool, they just have long necks that point their blunt heads toward the ground. (I wonder if sheep can look up...) Saw grass roofs and sand-brick walls and fences made out of branches bundled together. Kids waved at us wherever we went. Old men did too, from their benches in the shade.

The hotel in Toubacouta looks brand-new. And by that I mean they're still building some of the rooms. And by rooms I mean that each "room" is its own six-sided hut with whitewashed walls and an awkwardly-shaped bathroom with a shower that isn't exactly heated but not freezing cold, so it works. They also have air conditioning and a television, and WiFi (but no one brought their computers, of course). There's a pool and a full kitchen staff and a bar and a short retired frenchman named Phillippe from Bordeaux and Charles, the go-to for anything you'd need who has a brilliant smile and is always ready to cheerfully get towels or water bottles or a broom to kill the latest spider in your room.

And there was a spider in our room. Kelsey and I named it Felix. He was on the wall, shaped like a crab but flat as a tick and moves lightning fast when you try and catch him in the plastic cup we found in the bathroom that wouldn't have worked anyway because his legs were too long. Felix's body was about as big as a quarter maybe bigger and looked wicked. We composed letters to him aloud, in our spare time:

Dear Felix, please go away not quickly but slowly and with no sudden movements. Thanks! Love, Johanna.

Dear Felix, it isn't that you're unwelcome, it's that your welcome is imposing on our welcome. Please be gone when we get back. Love, Johanna.


And so on. It was endless fun, if you ignore the fact that there's a huge bloody spider on the wall. We went to see the town of Toubacouta, which is also the town of Soukuta, they sort of grew together into the same place which is nice because my internship is in Toubacouta and my friend Renee's is in Soukouta, which means we'll be in the same town. yaay! Oh, and we're so lucky to be going back there. Everyone says so, and I'm the first to agree. It's beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. We went to see the maire/mayor/chef du village/president of the area government first thing, as one does, to formally introduce ourselves and greet the representative of the population. Then walking around the town, taking pictures and getting waved at and followed around by children.

Visited the school, and across the street the dormitories for children who have too far to travel from the villages to go to school and back home every day. I'll go into more detail on that later. Back to the hotel for a lovely wonderful dinner, hanging out at the pool, etc. I'm gonna post this now and pick up later so my posts don't get too long!