Day 82: Judy and Nicky

For a Sunday, I did significantly more than I usually do. The Senegalese students and staff went to Rosso, Mauritania, and we (the Americans) chose not to go to Rosso, Senegal, because there’s really nothing to do there. For the Senegalese, the attraction of going to Mauritania comes from the fact that it’s easy to buy cheap goods (cell phones, DVD’s, fabrics, etc) and bring them back over the border into Senegal.

The Senegalese left early in the morning, but after being woken up by Eric, I was unable to go back to sleep. After a nice breakfast, I went to Allison’s, where she informed me that a meeting had been scheduled for the Americans and Judy and Nicky (the two program assistants that had arrived with Marian on Tuesday.

During the meeting, we talked a lot about how the program had been so far. More specifically, we talked about the goal of synthesizing our previous experiences, and gaining a better understanding of our trip (on all levels). Both Judy and Nicky are experienced in group dynamics work, and have worked in India (with the other Living Routes program.) They are very intelligent and articulate, and we all feel very comfortable speaking with them.

After meeting (for quite a while), we took a break for lunch and agreed to continue in the afternoon. We recommenced our discussion by talking about how these experiences (that we’re having now) will affect us when we return to the US. While this has definitely been a topic that I’ve thought about before, it was interesting to here what other people had to say, especially Nikki and Judy who have dealt with a lot of other international programs. Overall, everyone in our group was very happy to have some help in bringing all of our experiences together; help that we haven’t really received much of in the past.

(Unfortunately, Marian was not able to get the additional materials that we had expected to get. However, we weren’t really ready to receive them, and we can make due with what we have here already.)