Senegal

So nice to see the Atlantic Ocean finally! We arrived last night and checked in to our Radisson hotel on the ocean. Breaks our string of consecutive nights in a Four Seasons at five <sigh>, but ah well.....

We spend the day at a rural village well outside Dakar, about which more in a moment, but first we enjoy (!) a two-hour ride through the streets of Dakar. Crazy stuff, man. We're a caravan of 23 Toyota Land Rovers driving 70mph on neighborhood streets and boulevards led by a police escort with sirens going and everything. The locals must be wondering who we are. And yet without the escort we would never have made it to the village. I'm surprised we didn't kill any pedestrians or rear-end the Land Rover in front of us. That said, the driver was very competent and friendly. He only spoke French, and neither of my two fellow passengers did, so I got to practice my French for several hours today, which I enjoyed immensely. (Debb is sick with a bad cold so she stayed behind at the hotel today, attended to by our travel physician.)

At the village we are greeted by ladies in very colorful garb singing and shaking bowls off of which hang little bells.

We meet Molly, who founded an NGO called Tostan which over 38 years has grown to work in 8 African countries on literacy, human rights, health and sanitation, and importantly, eradicating the practice of female genital cutting. The imam seated to her right above was instrumental in beginning these programs many years ago and has personally visited 347 other tribes in Senegal to educate their people about the dangers and immorality of FGC, as they call it.

Even though this is a Muslim community, it is night-and-day different from Saudi Arabia. Compare the ladies' garb with the black abayas we saw in Arabia.

And the children are adorable, as they are everywhere around the world.

 

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