the beginning

I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning, the flight to Atlanta was fine, I slept a little because I didn’t sleep more then three hours the night before. Atlanta airport is the largest airport I can remember ever being in. Met up with one of the girls from our program, kaycee, at ATL where we caught our flight to Dakar, Senegal. We hadn’t really talked at any point before this, so we talked a bit about the trip and ourselves. Dakar airport was intense in so many different ways. As soon as I got off the plane my heart started to race and I suppose it hit me that there was no turning back from that point. I was in Africa (It looks silly to me now, to say that, but Africa is a magical place when you are sitting in your room in New Jersey but to the Gambia, America is the magical place).

Stephanie was waiting for me in the airport, and I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I saw her. Steph has been in Dakar since September and will be there until May. Props to her, I still don’t know if I could pull off what she is doing. Anyway, it was 530am and we had a few hours to wait until the ticket office opened for us to collect our SLOK airline tickets. Me, steph, kaycee and renee (she met us at the airport) sat around for a few hours, she taught us some phrases and we talked about her trip so far. When the airline counter opened is became clear that there was a problem or miscommunication. Having Stephanie there was actually a huge help, she ended up being our translator as many of the people we encountered spoke only broken English but fluent French. Starting around 11am we had quite the adventure as we were sent to various offices around the airport to discover what happened to our tickets. Eventually we talk to someone from the airline who tells us that we have no tickets. The ticket number we were given doesn’t exist. Now it is 1pm and our flight leaves at 230pm, we have no tickets. A few frantic calls to the house where we are staying and we are told that we just need to buy our tickets now. Tickets bought with 30min to spare I say bye to Stephanie, whom without, I feel we would have spent the night in Dakar. The flight to Gambia is fine and I slept through most of it. After landing we are met by some babucarr, our Wolof instructor/orientation leader. At this point I was in information overload as I struggled to comprehend his questions in the thick accent. If you have seen some of my pictures, you’ve seen some of what I have, flat as the eye can see, trash and sand everywhere. Traffic laws are nonexistent which was something we had been warned about before arriving but was still shocking to see on the way from the airport. Our house is ridiculous in everyway. We have one of the nicest houses in the area, and it is definitely the largest. All the houses here have walls and are referred to as compounds. We met Nut, Choco and Tyler who had been in the country for a few days already. It was nice to see some friendly faces. At this point I was past comprehending what was going on and just let my mind sit back while my body was on autopilot. We walked to the main drag called, The Pipeline, which is like Bloomfield ave with no traffic lights, no sidewalks and twice the volume of cars. The guys gave us a tour after which we came back to the house and I pretty much went to sleep…