On my first day in Senegal, I somehow lost 40,000 francs CFA. Welcome to Africa, kid. Since then, I’ve received plenty. Free love! And also, completely for free:
-A leather/snakeskin pouch from a guy in the touristy artisanal market who tried to rip me off, but then softened when I told him I had no ‘xaalis’
- An ‘I Love Africa’ necklace from a random guy while I was enjoying a plate of French fries
- A soap dish
- Senegal Report 2009 (in English!) from museum guide in Saint-Louis
- A plastic marabout calendar from the Leona pharmacy
-…

No one has ever called the mosque in Potou graceful.  Maybe when it was first built, maybe then they said that it was a good mosque: a clunky, stumpy tower which served to regularly pierce heaven with forceful cries of God’s goodness.  Potou, the town of a thousand Allahu Akbars before dawn.
She sat looking at it from a wiggly wooden bench that stretched the length of a pickup truck that had recently held the entire town’s breakfast.  She was still half asleep.
“Où vas-tu?” the driver greeted her, a white girl in Africa-land, “Léona?”
“Waaw,” she replied in his…

Becoming who we are.  Everyone told us this experience would change us, shape us.  Sure, I said.  I was in it for the adventure, not the personal development.
These past four and a half months have seen plenty of adventures.  My words were the first words several Senegalese babies ever heard.  I’ve spoken on the radio—entirely in Wolof.  I’ve received free djembe lessons and tea from some friendly Baay Falls on the side of a busy road in Dakar.  My fingers have been stained red from picking my family’s bissap, a tangy hibiscus plant.  The list goes on.  I got…

It’s easy to feel competent.  Easy, that is, until you find yourself spending the week in a Senegalese village with only a basic knowledge of Wolof and no Western toilet!  During my first week of village life, my name became Awa, after the first of my father’s two wives, and my journal became my new best friend.  I loved spending some quality time on the basang, the plastic mat that is my other new best friend in Louga (shhh, don’t tell anyone or my diary will be jealous!); reflecting on hilarious mishaps, fresh facts and my blossoming love for Senegal and my family; filling page after…