By lrich522
Things haven’t been particularly easy in this third week, but overall I’m really and truly enjoying myself and loving it here in Dakar. There is definitely a more relaxed vibe here, and no one is ever too rushed to stop and ask how you're doing. Now that I’ve started my internship and found myself in a routine of sorts, I thought I’d outline what a typical week looks like for anyone who may be curious, or interested in this program. (note: details vary for everyone. Except for the part about not having toilet paper. That's definitely a constant.)
Mondays and Wednesdays are for classes. I wake up around 6:45, shower, get ready, eat breakfast (which is always a giant piece of baguette with chocopain and tea), and catch the bus around 8:00 with some other students who live in my neighborhood. The bus stop is only a five-minute walk from my house and the stop where we get off is about ten minutes from the CIEE study center.
We normally arrive at the study center somewhere between 8:30 and 8:45. Classes start at 9 (however I have the first time slot free so I try to get some homework done during that time), and each one is an hour and fifteen minutes. After my free space I have beginner’s Wolof, public health, lunch, democracy and governance, and advanced French for development studies, all of which are in French. For lunch, we can leave to buy food, go home, or even ask our families to pack us a lunch, but normally we eat on the roof terrace where there is a small kitchen with a kind woman named Marie who sells spectacular food. There’s a menu consisting of massive sandwiches on entire baguettes or you can by the “plat du jour”. Each of those cost 1,000 CFA francs which is equivalent to about $1.60. Last week I had the plat du jour, which was a plate of couscous and beef, and it was absolutely fantastic.
Classes end at 5:15 (I should probably get more accustomed to writing 17h15), and we either hang around at the study center to do homework and use wifi, or we head straight home.On Tuesdays or Thursdays, you have the option of doing an internship or volunteer work.
The development studies program requires an internship, so on those days I wake up around the same time and catch the 8:00 bus to head to Yoff. My internship is with ImagiNation Afrika, which provides educational programs that are accessible to anyone in the community. They stress experiential learning and encourage critical thinking in young kids, in order to facilitate development forward thinking in young African children. I’ve only been there twice so far, but my next blog will focus on the work that the organization is doing as well as how I will be contributing. On Tuesdays I am there from 9-5, and on Thursdays I am there from 9-1 because I have my development seminar at 2. We’ll also go on some Fridays when we don’t have anything to do at CIEE.
Each night, I eat dinner with my host family around 9 pm/21h. All of the families here seem to eat that late, which at first was a strange adjustment to make. What we eat for dinner varies, but I have loved just about everything I’ve eaten even if I have no clue what it is. It’s mainly rice, couscous, or millet based, with some sort of meat, bread, and not many vegetables. Most weekends I find myself at the beach during the day (even though it’s “winter”) and my host family thinks we’re crazy for swimming in February. Friday evening I went to a concert in my neighborhood, Saturday I went to Ile de Ngor and spent the day on the beach, and today I relaxed at home then showed my host brother and his friends how to make guacamole with some other CIEE students while they made us tea.
This schedule seems pretty similar to an American university experience, however these parallels only make the cultural differences that much more salient. So while class schedules and morning routines remain somewhat the same, the aspects of day-to-day life here thus far that are different from home really throw me out of system just when I think I’m beginning to grasp the culture and my place in it. For instance, my professors have very different point of views from my professors back home, the buses are crammed full of people so much so that you sometimes have to stand in the doorway and hold on tight, catcalling is pervasive, I can’t go wherever I want, wear whatever I want, or eat whatever I want, and toilet paper is just not a thing. I did not expect to study abroad and rest completely within the confines of my comfort zone; however every time I think I’m getting a grip something knocks me off course. I guess being repeatedly pushed out of my comfort zone just when I think I’ve figured everything out is part of the abroad experience, and if I wasn’t up for the challenge I would’ve stayed home.