A buyer's market...

As internet time is hard to come by here, I have to keep in contact with everyone here rather than via email. It's hard not being able to read messages regularly or to talk on the phone at all, but I'm adjusting. Perhaps as well as I am adjusting to the French keyboard. Someone should have warned me to pack a good old American QWERTY; I never would have imagined the need for it.

I'm sure somewhere in Dakar someone will give me a "good price" for one. I have learned that anything can be bought here. After bluffing to a vendor that I was out of money today, she offered to trade the necklace she was trying to sell me for my lipstick. Maybe if I had two tubes...but I packed light, so no deal. Plus, it was used lipstick! I could not do that in good conscience. After we exchanged US money for CFAs yesterday at the bank (the value of a dollar being down to 395 CFA, whereas it is optimally closer to 500 CFA), we were introduced to the open market, and it's everywhere! Obviously because we were Americans, we drew a crowd, but people were selling everything from cell phone chips, t-shirts and caps, dolls, and jewelry to boom boxes and jelly shoes. I lie not. It started raining suddenly and a flock of umbrella salesmen appeared. One girl was selling shower caps.

So far, I have spent my money on internet time (500 CFA per hour) and jewelry to give to my friends when I return. Still, the computers here in the guest house are slow and do not have Microsoft Word, speakers, cameras or microphones, so my communication seems one sided, except when I can use Yahoo Messenger. Too bad my boys are too young to type.

I have only been here about two days, but already I have a million stories to tell and about as many pictures to show. I'm having a great time and learning a lot, but I'm surprisingly homesick. It feels more like I will be here a year rather than twelve days. Today was fabulous, though; going to Goree Island to see the slave houses and the "Door of No Return" was a truly priceless experience. It was so worth the trip to have that tour and to hear Professor Ousemane Sène's lecture on Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Negritude Movement. I am so full. I could go home now and be happy, but we are just getting started. I can't wait to get home and add my pictures to my blog. I might later check to see how difficult it would be to upload them from here.

I have so much more to share, but the rest will have to go in my journal. My time is about up in the lab, and others are waiting. Before I go, however, allow me to share a thought from Prof Sène:

Humans (westerners, Europeans, etc) are too narcissistic to accept anything they cannot control (i.e., the spirit world)--they try to turn everything into something they can control--money.