Dakar

It has been a while. I left Uganda on the 9th of May. I felt like I was pretty much done with courses at that point. Little did I know that our group paper would be sooo much more work, especially with the 4 of us scattered throughout Africa. And that even after we submitted it, it would come back to haunt us. I love how universities always save the most impossible profs for the end. Anyway, its all water under the bridge now. Lets move on.

Dakar seems calmer now then when I last visited in 2006. Maybe thats becasue I came from the organized chaos and dense population of Kampala. Maybe because there have been some major improvements in roads since I was last here so there is not an eneormous amount of traffic everywhere. The only things that stress me here are the street vendors who will not take no for an answer, and who instead of saying "madame" to get your attention go with "tssssss!" "tssssss!" They drive me crazy, and I refuse to give my business (in the event that I need some of the random things they sell like shoe laces, or inflatable pool toys...) to someone who tries to get my attention that way. Its not cultural, its just rude.

Moving along, I have not been offered a placent by VSO in quite a while, so I started looking for my own thing here. I found a placement doing a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) internship at Femmes Africa Solidarite, a small international NGO that works to engender the peace process in post-conflict countries throughout Africa. I stumbled upon this NGO which is a mixture of my main areas of interest and my program at RRU; women, development, and peacebuilding. The M&E part is a big learning curve, but hey if it doesn't involve complex math and chemistry I can do it.

There is one other intern here who is from Australia. The other staff are mostly Senegalese and everyone is pretty quiet and laid back. It is strange sitting in an office alone, after sharing a big office with 8 people, and with a lot traffic passing through, in Calgary. I miss all that activity and the laughs. Oh well. Did I mention our office is in a building they built to be a fancy hotel overlooking the beach? And that I had lunch on the beach today? Must have forgot!