Saturday and Sunday seem to have run together a bit. Everyone has finally arrived into Dakar and we all have our own travel adventure stories: lost luggage, sprinting to connecting flights, missed connections, screaming babies...you get my drift! For me, it was scribbling my thoughts on any available sheet of paper for these blog entries, borrowing someone's laptop to post my Friday blog and hoping that my laptop could be fixed once in Dakar.
We are a team is 14: 7 men and 7 women from 7 countries: Belgium, Canada, China, India, Japan, Switzerland and USA. Together, we spent most of Saturday afternoon on a bus tour of the city of Dakar, getting our bearings on the city. There is construction going on everywhere, but not like we know it with cranes and fancy motorized equipment. Many job sites still use ropes and pulleys to move buckets and pallets to upper floors and horses are hitched to pull carts. Most is new construction but there is a realization that space is limited in the city so reclamation of older, abandoned structures is beginning to take place as well.
The city is really crowded right now in preparation for the Muslim holiday of Tabaski. It felt pretty strange driving thru the narrow market streets that went on for blocks and were completely packed with people practically touching the bus as we rolled through. The fabric colors are amazing and the women are absolutely beautiful in their brightly colored dresses. I have no idea how they can stand the heat and humidity and still look so lovely. But the aromas....well, the aromas are certainly different than my backyard in Louisville!
On Sunday morning we all participated in a community service project to clean the beach of a local fishing village. Frankly, I was shocked by the condition of the beach area...there was garbage everywhere. The ocean and views are breathtaking, but the beaches are not. Environmental awareness is just beginning to take hold here. In less than 1 hour, 20 jumbo garbage bags were filled. We could have gone on for hours more and still there would be trash to collect. The leader from the village spoke to us when we were done expressing gratitude and giving us hope that our efforts have set an example that will continue into the future. Fingers crossed!
In the afternoon all 14 of us did some team building exercises to get to know each other better. Sandra Di Quinzio (from Canada), Susanne Janssen (from Switzerland) and I will be a team to develop a market penetration plan for the Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) Toolkit - www.smetoolkit.org - in Senegal. More info to come on our project! I'm looking forward to tomorrow when we meet our local clients and work begins!
#ibmcsc senegal
I think I told you I was married in Senegal. We stayed at the Dakar Sofitel. You can't miss it - a big orange and yellow building on a hill. It was wonderful. Looking forward to reading more of your adventures.
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