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!