Craig and Taylors Arrival in Senegal

Connie and Taylor in Thies Senegal

Craig and Taylor joined Connie in Thies, Senegal early this week. After over 24 hours of travel via San Fransisco and Paris we arrived on a late night flight into Dakar, the seaport capital of Senegal. All the luggage made it, and we had lots of "aggressive luggage handlers" that were looking for a job to push our luggage cart through customs and into the parking lot. Connie met us outside of customs along with Abduli, the driver of a vehicle owned by a local missionary service. We made it through town and were traveling a rural highway towards Thies when we were flagged over, by police at an police checkpoint. After 20 minutes of interrogation our driver was able to come back to the vehicle and take us on to Thies, our new home. The bad news for Abduli was he had to return to the checkpoint after dropping us off and spend the night under some form of arrest until he could pay for the crime of driving with a broken taillight. (The taillight worked, some of the plastic was broken). It was midnight by the time we arrived and were greeted by a classmate of Connie's - Lordienne, from Cameroon. She said later she always stays up if anyone is out late.

Thies is a city of 500,000 with all modes of transportation from cars to buses to horse drawn carts. The climate is hot and arid with very little vegetation.

The spoken language is French along with Wolof. Most of Connie"s classmates speak only French and so we are constantly trying to learn their language. The unspoken language of a smile and laughter seems to work well in most situations.