I'm in Touba!

And I don't know how much time I have left on the internet right now.... Touba is good! I don't know where to start. My family is great. My supervisor is Cheikh Amar and he is also my host father... or brother I guess because he's only 36. We live in a compound with approximately 20 family members but its hard to know who actually lives there and who doesn't. There's lots of women and one really hilarious grandmother, my supervisor's twin brother who's going back to work in Italy on Monday, a sixteen year old girl named Ami who's incredible and actually speaks French, and lots of brothers and little children. There's three girls around the age of 6 and they're my best buddies. The family only speaks Wolof but Ami and Cheikh know French and some of the brothers know a little. The grandmother pretends she doesn't but then sometimes she'll break out with perfectly good French and then act like she doesn't know what happened. We don't really do anything as a family except eat and eat and eat, and drink lots of cafe touba which is this spicy sugary coffee that's pretty weird and gives me a headache. They're really welcoming and accomodating and treat me as a family member. Every time I speak Wolof it's an event, like one of the aunts said thank you to me for helping her to take out her braids and I said Nookobokk, which means you're welcome. Not only did she crack up, but everyone else around us started laughing, and then later when we went inside she told the story to the rest of the family and they had a good laugh too. We spend most of our time together in the courtyard, which is just sand and we put out mats and chairs and mattresses. The family is really well off by Senegalese standards and I didnt expect that at all, although I should have because Touba is EASILY the wealthiest city in the country and it kind of blows me away. They just finished re-doing their house and now we have 10 bedrooms each with a queen or king sized bed. Each bedroom has its own full bathroom and we have a satellite TV with two dishes that gets every international channel possible, about 310 all told. Senegal only has 2 TV channels. We have two living rooms each with full sets of furniture. I can't really express how much this stands in contrast with the rest of Senegal. It's really remarkable. My organization is ASCODE and it's about a 10 minute drive from the house. Cheikh and i take a car there every day. We only live two blocks from the Grand Mosque, which I visited this morning with Ami and it is HUGE and beautiful, all marble and chandeliers and minarets and carved wood. I tried to dress appropriately before going but I actually didnt have anything that covered enough so I borrowed one of Ami's outfits and headscarfs. I do have a photo of this so you can all see me dressing up! I still can't figure out how women keep the scarfs on their head because mine kept falling off in front of everyone inside the mosque. I couldn't go all the way in because I'm not muslim but Ami took my camera and went inside and took pictures. ASCODE is good, we're still sorting out what I'll do but for now I'm interviewing immigrants' families, doing site visits to their 'integrated projects' - multifaceted projects - in the surrounding rural areas.... and learning to be a tailor! They do training at the office for young women who come from emigrant families so that they learnt o sew, and then they help them open businesses,a nd they do French literacy at the same time, so I'll hang uot with them and learn to sew. Also they want me to train my colleagues in English and in microfinance because they run a mutual here. I dont know that I know enough about microfinance to teach it yet but we'll see. It's really an exchange between what I can teach them and what they can teach me. I think it's going to be great. I have to go because the credit's up at the cyber cafe, later!!