Day 2

This morning I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the Islamic call for prayer. The calls occur 5 times a day and are announced over loudspeakers so people are able to hear them wherever they are. Some people will pray as soon as they hear the call, while others will pray sometime within the next hour.

When I first turned the shower on, the water pressure looked promising! But the longer it stayed on, it began to slow to a trickle. No hair washing for today :(

A friend of Kari’s, Diami, was selling jewelry at the Dakar Academy the other day. She told Kari that not many people were buying her jewelry. So Kari and I offered to sit in front of her stand, thinking that if people saw that 2 people were REALLY interested in Diami’s jewelry, then they should check it out too.

I helped Kari fill 100 bags of popcorn for her children at the community center. The community center is for children who cannot afford school and speak only Wolof. We will be teaching them French and dance. While we were making popcorn for them, we added sugar instead of salt because that is the custom here. Popcorn to the children is like funnel cakes for us in America—not completely foreign to them, but it is definitely a special treat.

the 100 bags of popcorn I filled

For dinner we ate fatayas, which are Lebanese. They are fried pastries about the size of chicken strips and filled usually with meat. We dipped them in a special onion sauce. They were delicious!

~Did you know?~
In Senegal men and women do not hold hands, but men will hold hands with other men. This is a sign of friendship, nothing more.