Off-roading in the bush

Happy Birthday Mom! Hope you have a terrific day today! Go out for sushi, or Italian, or Red Lobster… or any meal that has a delicious bottle of red wine next to it. Enjoy for me! Love and miss you!

So it’s been a while since I have last written. I have been busy getting used to being frustrated. I have studied and been told thousands of times that when living abroad you go through different stages. Early on is the honeymoon stage when everything is wonderful and you think you never want to leave. Then that all disappears and you realize that life is better in America. I hope I move on soon to the stage that life becomes more comfortable. I’ll just say I have hit a few roadblocks of people not wanting to work with me or others saying they are in love with me and “there is nothing I can do about it since God made him that way”. Hmm. So I took a little break and I am back in Bambey ready to start again, but this time I am going to try and fit in less and be myself more. I’ll let you know how it goes.

My little break started with another Muslim holiday. Have I mentioned before that these holidays just aren’t the same? And other holidays in America are better (that’s the end of the honeymoon stage talking, sorry). So I went with my family in a rented van to the Tidiane pilgrimage site. I happen to have a friend that lives there so I was quite easily talked into going since I could spend the holiday with him and another friend that came in. Although I was told the van would be ready to pick us up at 7, that’s when I got up, took my time getting ready and packed, and it left after 10. It took a while finding the house, but we got there and without greeting anyone, we went in the house. The first thing weird about this celebration, was that we went to lie down in a back bedroom. Yes, like 10 of us women and kids in one bed and a few chairs to rest rather than socialize. After like 45 minutes, we were invited to breakfast at noon. After, we went up to the roof where a large shade structure was put up with lots of pillows and mattresses. There, we waited for lunch while people prayed. Lunch was great, but after I was rather excited to get out of there and speak some English; not to mention people watch. The city has 50,000 habitants, but it attracts over 1 million people. I bought some coconut and pineapple on the street and actually ran into someone from my Thies family.

After all these great celebrations, my friend and I decided to go to Dakar the next morn. The problem is that everyone wants to leave at that time so traffic just sits. I had 2 books with me and planned on reading them both and hopefully get to Dakar by sunset. Well! We lucked out, if you can call it that! After taking the last 2 seats of the 7-place car, excellent timing, it took us an hour just to get out of the garage. But that’s when the fun began! Our driver seems to have done this before. He followed a sand path into the bush, very quickly! A lot of sand acts like snow and I really thought we were going to fishtail into a few trees, people, and other vehicles. I say people since there were MANY people out pushing and digging sand out from under cars. Also, there were the manioc farmers running around with machetes threatening drivers that didn’t stay on the deep sandy path, which was impossible. Men were all in fancy clothing pushing and women were either in the cars (where I was :-) or in the shade breastfeeding kids and having to run after the cars after they became unstuck. It was hilarious and really dangerous, but most the whole way we could see the national road and traffic simply didn’t move. We weaved in and out of fields, cars and villages to make it almost the whole way to Thies, over 20k away! Somehow we made it to Dakar in about 5 and half hours, when usually it takes about 2 and half or 3. I only made it halfway through one of my books!