Yet again, I managed to let my schedule get the best of me and it's been quite a while since writing last, sorry! Alright, I'll get right into it...

May 19 was our first day on campus! I went out this day with one of the staff on the project, Sarah. Because the only place we could really go on campus was the English department, and most of our team was already there, Sarah and I decided to look for students in the garden right outside of the English dept. Almost immediately after we started talking to a girl studying alone at a table, a crowd of people surrounded us. They were all her friends, but they were more interested in why two white, presumably British girls were talking to their friend and if they could get in on the conversation. [Since we were hanging around the English dept, it was a pretty safe bet that anyone we ran into was an English major and would LOVE to practice speaking with a native speaker.] The girls we were talking to ended up being three of Ashley and Christy's (the STINT girls) contacts so after talking that day, we never really got to meet up with them again. However, we did exchange contact info with the guy that stayed around to talk, Lamine. A few weeks later, Annie and I were already to talk with Lamine and a friend of his who had many questions about our faith. However, on this day, the conversation with Lamine quickly turned into an "argument." Though we refused to argue with Lamine, we did take advantage of his knowledge of the Islamic faith; we were able to ask him many questions which helped us to learn more about Islam as well as let him know how Christianity differed. One of the men who was hanging around our table happened to be a teacher in the English dept....he ended up inviting Sarah and I to help him teach his class that afternoon. It was basically just a quiz in which we read an article to them in English and they had to answer questions corresponding to the article; the teacher was really excited to have native English speakers helping with the quiz and it was fun to help and see how they run class in Senegal!


That night our team played a few games for our "team bonding" time--I even won the game of "family" we played :) This is a picture of some of us playing "Senegal Ball"--basically you just try to get the ball through other peoples legs and you can only use one hand!

First few days in Senegal...

Well, I guess everyone knows I'm home now. And good news! I've finally found some time to sit down and blog about this summer!

The first few days that we were in country were quite overwhelming. We ran into some delays at the airport and ended up departing from JFK much later than scheduled so we had to fly through the night. Anyone that's ever flown before knows how hard it is to sleep on a plane. As you can imagine, not being able to sleep made for an interesting first day in Senegal. As we walked out the door of the airport we were greeted by a group of malnourished children (I mean, it was Africa) called the talibe boys. ["Talibe" is of Arabic origin and literally translates as "a person in need of something"] An Islamic leader called a Marabout will take the boys at a young age from their village because their parents do not feel that they can take care of them. The marabout's promise is to take care of the boys providing them with a home, food, and education in exchange for the labor of the boys. This traditional education system works well in most of West Africa. However, in Senegal, the marabouts have taken advantage of the system exploiting the children. Generally, the boys are stuck out on the street begging for money and sadly, most of the time, they are not taken care of. These talibes are believed to be kept against their will, unfed, and forced to stay with the marabout until the age of about 18. And the education that they are given is much less than what they were promised. The marabout will usually only teach them to recite the Qur'an, which is in Arabic so many of the talibes do not even learn to speak the languages of Senegal. Below is a picture of some talibes hanging around outside of our truck later in the summer in hopes that we will give them some money to take back to their marabout. Our first day in Senegal we were told to ignore the children...giving them money would only support this system. Many of the older talibes experienced sexual exploitation and made unacceptable gestures to us during our stay so the best way to deal with them was to keep walking. Our team quickly learned to carry bread, vegetables, and fruit with us so that when we encountered them we would have something of nutritional value to give them.


After checking in to our hotel (pictures below), we split up into groups and the STINTers took us all to different Westernized "restaurants" for our first meal in Senegal. Anyone that knows me knows how picky I am with my food. I really wasn't sure of anything on the menu (we later learned nothing ever came out of the kitchen like the menu describes it) so I decided to order a chwarma poulet (some sort of chicken wrap) because the entire STINT team recommended it. I'm not joking when I say it was one of the worst meals I have ever had (for the record, everyone else liked it...sad to say I'm that picky). Luckily, I quickly learned which meals I would be able to eat so I never had another meal quite like this one (except maybe the goat we ate in the villages).



















The first few days were really a whirlwind; the STINTers gave us a tour of the campus we were going to be meeting students on soon and even had a scavenger hunt prepared for us to help us learn our way around. Though the campus was not much larger than UNCW's campus, I felt as if I had never walked so much in my life. Here's some pictures from our tour of the campus that day.

Though these pictures make the campus look vacant, there are actually MANY students who attend UCAD (Université Cheikh Anta Diop). The school was built for only 10,000 students but somewhere around 60,000 students attend! That means they have anywhere from 8-11 people living in a dorm room made for 2!!

So, normally the campus was packed! You couldn't walk around without bumping in to people or dodging out of their way. The streets were filled with people and taxis driving through. We took this tour on a Sunday and many of the students travel home to their village for the weekends so that is why these pictures make the campus look so empty. This picture to the right was taken on the soccer field at the university (what a pain it must be to play in the sand!). Those buildings in the background are some of the dorms.

Much of our agenda the first few days was receiving rules and tips for ministry with the students. Our second day there we split up into groups of 4 and did a prayer walk through the campus. We also had a party at our hotel where the STINT team invited all of their contacts and allowed us to have our first real interactions with the Senegalese students (one of my blogs below was actually after this night!) in which we were able to talk to them about their faith (and many other things). This is one of the only pictures from that night:



Well, that's it for the first blog. I'll be trying to get the rest of the trip on here soon! Sorry it has taken so long to get started and thanks for being patient everyone!

Week one update!

Just wanted to drop in a short update for prayer requests!

If you all could pray for the energy of our team that would be great! Our days are long and filled with many meetings with students, and much walking so we are all exhausted. More than that, the conversations we have with the students are also very mentally and spiritually draining so it seems as if we are all lacking energy to do the things we have been called to do this summer.

Pray for the students! Pray that God will send us the students He wants us to meet. We will soon be doing follow up contacts with students that came to the showing of our film “Magdalena;” there were many students who said they would like to meet with someone for CPC (Campus Pour Christ, we do not say Crusade here) so please pray that these students have an open heart and mind as we go into the meetings and that they will listen to hear the Gospel presented. Also pray for our team to be good listeners and to not just shove information down the students’ throats.

If you could pray that our team could find ways to help the students understand the Gospel better when it is read to them that would be great. For example, the Senegalese people have suffered much through life so far and sometimes they like to bring that up in conversation. I was talking with a man the other day who didn’t quite seem to understand that evil and suffering in our world are a result of our sin and the fall of man. So if you could pray for them to truly understand God’s love for us and that He doesn’t want His people to hurt, that would be very helpful.

Many of the women here seem to dislike certain things about Islam, as well as a few other things about the Senegalese culture. It is not unheard of for a man to have more than one wife and many of the women here, though they consider it very important, are fearful of marriage because they are afraid that their husbands will cheat, leave, share her with another man, or marry another woman as well. The other night we had a party and invited many of the STINT team’s contacts so we could interact with the Senegalese. One woman was telling the story of how she had been seeing a man for about 5 years now; just a little bit ago he just up and married another woman. She turned to one of my teammates to ask what she should do and how she could get him back. The women here have so much hurt in their lives that they carry around with them day to day and Allah does not offer them anything for that. Please pray that we will be able to convey the beautiful love story that the Gospel is to these women in a way that they understand that there is hope, forgiveness, grace, and FREEDOM in Jesus Christ; and that it’s not unusual to long for these relationships (though we often seek them in the wrong things/people), that is what we were created for, a relationship with Christ.

The Senegalese people are very literal; they have box minds so when confronted with the Trinity they can’t comprehend how God is only one. I have been told so many times that I am polytheistic since being here. Thought we have many examples that would definitely convince me if I were confused on this subject, the Senegalese are not satisfied with it and they just do not understand the Trinity. If you all could please pray for ways for our team to convey this more clearly to them and for them to understand this better that would be so helpful!

The men here are very argumentative and though the women are only supposed to minister to women, many of the men will start conversations with us asking why we are here (clearly, little white girls are the minority so I would probably be curious too). I have been in many conversations with men since being here and they all seem to go the same way; the mean are very argumentative. They know much more about their faith than the women do and they definitely want to defend it. But we are not here to argue, we are only here to make known the truth of the Gospel (Romans 10:14-15) so that they too can enter to Paradise (they don’t call it Heaven). So please pray for us to find ways to minister to the women without the mean flocking around and causing distractions; we have many men here who are more than capable to minister to these men with questions. Also, for the men to be less defensive so that they can actually hear the truth of the Gospel.

Throughout the summer I may be posting small updates or maybe more prayer requests. Thanks for the continued support and prayers! God bless!

First thoughts...

Hey y'all!

WE'RE HERE!! I'm finally in Senegal! We arrived on Sunday morning about 8am and started our first day of training; for many of us that was after not sleeping at all on the flight. I'm going to apologize now for any spelling/grammatical errors,this keyboard is different than those we are used to so it's taking some time for me to type. Also, we found out that our schedules don't allow for much internet time so I won't be able to blog as much as I had hoped while here. I'm going to try to post small blogs throughout the 6 weeks but I am keeping a journal that I'm planing to convert to blogs when we return to the states!

Today was our first real interaction with the students. I've found that it's very easy to turn the conversation spiritual. The Senegalese are all very friendly and open and love to talk about with Americans so that they can practice their English. After speaking with some students today, I've found that Islam is actually quite similar to Christianity. Their only problem is that they're missing out on Jesus. They are very literal thinkers here in Senegal so they have trouble comprehending the Trinity; they believe that "followers of Christ" are polytheistic, because we believe in God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (Throughout these blogs, you will hear me refer to us as either followers of Christ or Protestants. Senegal is 95% Muslim, 4% Roman Catholic, and the last 1% varies. The Senegalese refer to the Catholics as Christians but there is a difference so we must make a distinction to the students here.) As you can imagine, it's difficult to explain to them how Jesus IS God when they have believed that He was nothing more than a good person/prophet all their lives. I ask that you will all pray for our team as we try to overcome the language barrier and speak the Truth to these students who ARE clearly seeking something more than what they've been given.

My time on the computer is running up so this is all for now. But if you would all continue to pray for us that would be great! I'll try to get some specific prayer requests up soon. Thanks and God bless!

I'm going to Senegal y'all!

Originally this blog was created by request of my Eng 201 teacher; many assignments were due via blog. Once the course ended, I didn't keep up with blogging (you can see my previous post was in November). But now that I will be venturing to Dakar, Senegal for the summer, I will be using this blog to keep my friends and family updated on our trip!

I'd like to thank all of you for your support in prayer and finances. Without you all, this trip would not be possible for me and I'm so thankful for each of you and your call to help out with my missions this summer. As many of you know, I've been thinking about missions work for quite some time now and I am so excited to finally be able to do what has been placed on my heart. We will be flying out May 15--so that's 19 days & counting! I know the rest of the team is just as excited as I am to get there and start sharing the Good News! Though I'm going to update as often as possible, you might also want to check out the blog by the STINT-ers who have been in Dakar since October.

Again, thank you all for everything! Hope you enjoy the readings & picures to come!

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
-Acts 1:8

Well, my brother got married this past weekend. Honestly, I wasn't sure if it would ever happen. Not any time soon at least. Not because I thought he wouldn't meet anyone, I knew that would/did happen. He just likes to take his time with everything he does. He doesn't rush through life at all. He even took 6 years to get out of college! Anyway, the wedding was wonderful. Julie, the bride (and my new sister!), is from Salisbury so the reception was held in the historic Salisbury Depot. It was such a beautiful wedding! The photographer hasn't put the photos up yet but here are a few taken by friends who attended:

like cannons in the night

As you probably know, last night around 4am was the best time to see the Leonid meteor shower. I, of course, took full advantage of the fact that I live at the beach; I went with a friend around 3 in the morning down to the south end of Wrightsville to watch the meteors. I have never actually seen a meteor shower, or even a shooting star. So this was a new experience for me. Although it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it was beautiful nonetheless.

We ended up staying out on the beach and watching the sun rise also. I’m from the mountains so I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors; I love being surrounded by nature, whether it’s hills and trees or sand and ocean. One of my favorite things to do is just bask in the beauty of creation. It’s just so amazing to me, everything He created. Whenever I actually stop and take the time—which is actually often—to notice how magnificent and breathtaking our world is, it reminds me just how big and sovereign He really is. To know that the God I serve created every single detail of this beautiful world we live in, just makes me feel so much more secure in His promise to take complete care of me.


"You are holy, great and mighty
The moon and the stars declare who You are
I'm so unworthy, but still You love me
Forever my heart will sing of how great You are"