Day 2- UCAD

Today was my first day discovering the university UCAD. To get there you have to take a bus or a clando from sacre coeur. This in itself poses two problems for getting there. The “Clando” is a fake taxi that is run illegally and you basically just go up to parked cars and ask them to take you places for 250cfas, which is like 50cents. I am still too scared to do this by myself, partly because you have to go to a very dirty part of town to get them and I don’t really like the walk by myself and partly because I don’t know my way around yet so I don’t know if they’re going to take me to the right place. Nonetheless they are fun to take when Virginie is with me.
The bus on the other hand is ok too, but you walk a ways to get it and it only runs sometimes because there are a bunch of student strikes where they attack the cars and the busses that come on campus. I’m excited to see this happen. I’ve been told it’s quite frequent.
Anyways, we get to school and it is HUGE. It literally goes on for MILES. I was shown the AIESEC office, and even though it is run down it is like quadruple the size of our AIESEC office at GW. Everyone was there! I met most of the E-board and the MCPresident and some others. My work hasn’t technically started yet, so I was offered to help perform interviews for prospective AIESECers with the President, Coumba. The questions are pretty rudimentary: sell me this pen, describe yourself, why do you think you should be part of AIESEC, etc. But then that’s where I came in, the white girl who speaks English asks: How do you feel about homosexuality? Keep in mind I’m asking this in an EXTREMELY Muslim country. Answers ranged from we should kill them all, thus commencing another genocide, to people being extremely open about it.
Interviewing these people about who they were and where they came from was extremely interesting. I found out that UCAD is one of the best universities in the region. It was built to teach and hold 40,000 students, but currently it holds 60,000 and you can see that there is not enough room.
After the interviews, I still had no clue what I was supposed to do for the interviews so I just wandered around and then went back to the office. Guess who was there!?!?! Nicolette!! The other American girl!! So naturally we were both like omg another white face! We went exploring and I found an internet café. Today was fun, but nothing that interesting.
WAIT! At around 8pm we had a meeting for the launch of afritour. I basically sat there while 20 African men fought Saly on what time we should have the next meeting. I’ve never seen so much indecisiveness in my life. Then it was time to go home. The food here is EXCELLENT. I had blowfish skewers and fries with bread and salad. To die for. Then Virginie and I went to buy fruits and ice cream. I was proposed to yet again and turned them down yet again. I feel bad breaking all these Senegalese hearts.