Day 14 - More lectures. Yayy.

I was starting to think that maybe things weren’t really safe in this country for girls, as I’ve been getting heckled more and more when I go out into the streets by myself.  I’m gradually realizing though that it’s not all girls, just the blonde American ones.  Lucky me.  We had two guest lecturers today.  The first was about Saint-Louis, it discussed the importance of the city as a major trade port, and the French and English fight for ownership of the region.  I didn’t really catch most of the details, I’ll have to read over my notes later to grasp the full lecture.  I’m not particularly good at simultaneously copying down notes and listening to lectures when they’re in French.  I should probably work on that.  The other lecture was another Wolof one, but we had a different professor this time and he was much better than the first.  He actually taught us some useful verbs and phrases, as well as the basic conjugations.  Actually, Wolof seems to be much simpler than most languages, unfortunately I don’t think I’ll ever have a use for it again after this trip.  This has been the most useful thing we’ve learned so far: Ndax dègg nga wolof? Déeded, waante maangiy jàng wolof.  That roughly translate to: Do you understand Wolof?  No, but I am in the process of learning Wolof.  That will probably be the only full sentence that I actually attempt to memorize.  I think we’re supposed to have another lecture in Wolof tomorrow, hopefully we will be able to get the same professor for that one.  I think it’s kind of strange actually that roughly half of our lectures have been about Wolof.  Our French has gotten plenty of practice, but we haven’t really been learning about anything that relates to French.  I’m fairly certain that if the study abroad office knew what was going on during this trip they’d be fairly upset.  That and the fact that our professor hasn’t been sticking to our schedule at all.  We’ve stopped even reading it, because nothing on it is ever right.  We just ask him each day when and where he wants to meet us the next day.  Out of the three papers we were supposed to have written by now, we’ve only written one, and it was in a blog posting style rather than a typical essay format like it was originally supposed to be.  Not that I’m complaining about the lack of work, I’m just giggling at the idea of the school learning what we’ve been up to.  For now I will just enjoy it and hope that lack of assignments means that he plans on being an easy-grader for this class.

P.S. The three year-old in the house just bumped into my computer, and it fell and part of the screen is cracked.  Since it’s a touch screen, this could create problems.  If things get worse and I can no longer use it, I will try to start getting to WARC earlier so I can type up a blog piece before classes, but posts might become less frequent, especially if we’re going on day trips.  Fingers crossed the cracks just stay as they are, and don’t complicate things.  (And yes, things like this do always happen to me.  Deal with it.)