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!
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