WAIST

The mosque on Ouakam beach in Dakar.

Me, Lindsay and Holly at the lighthousem, recovering from teh bus ride.

View from the lighthouse.

Peace Corps Mali had the best uniforms! Those are Dogon hats.

Stephanie and Amy cheer on the team.

I just returned from the West African International Softball Tournament, which is held yearly in Dakar, Senegal. It was absolutely fantastic.



There were 50 Peace Corps volunteers from Mali going, so we actually chartered a bus to go from Bamako to Dakar. My dad checked online last night, and apparently this is a distance of 675 miles. Well. My trip began with a bus ride from Sikasso to Bamako, which I actually made in record time -- under 6 hours. I spent the night in Bamako, and in the morning we all boarded the bus, intending to go to Kayes, a city in western Mali, and spend the night there at the Peace Corps transit house. It took about 9 hours. There are about 8 beds at the transit house, so most of us were on the floor, including me. It was uncomfortable, but we left early the next morning for the really uncomfortable part of the trip -- the bus ride from Kayes all the way across Senegal. We were anticipating that it would take somewhere between 18 and 30 hours.



It took 20, and that was with absolutely nothing going wrong -- the bus didn't break down or anything. Basically, we were zooming along out of Kayes and across the border, but after a town in central Senegal called Tambacounda, the road turns into the worst road you can possibly imagine. It lookied like the surface of the moon because it was so covered in potholes. The bus could only go 15 or 20 mph the whole time. So we rolled into Dakar around 3 a.m., but we had no hotel reservations for that night, so we slept on the bus for a few hours until we could check into the hotel.



Having studied abroad in Dakar, I was surprised that even just glimpsing Dakar again at 3 in the morning, I was blown away. I was blown away by how developed and nice and clean it looked! Some people tried to pee near the bus and got yelled at! That would never happen in Mali! There were tall buildings, and we were parked by a wrought iron fence, that enclosed a LAWN. The streets were all paved. I wondered for a minute if it had actually been that nice when I was there!



In the morning I went straight to the Club Atlantique, the venue hosting WAIST, with a few other people because we were going to be staying at homestays instead of hotels. (Embassy workers and other ex-pats allow participants in WAIST to stay at their houses during the tournament. It turns out the embassy actually gives them mattresses to do so.) The Club Atlantique has baseball fields, tennis courts, a volleyball court, a pool, a bar, and a snack bar. After two days on the road we were filthy so we showered there, then relaxed by the pool and had some food, then went and walked to a lighthouse up the coast.



We hung out at the pool for the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening got paired with our hosts. My friend Amy and I were together, with a 30-something embassy worker. His apartment is in the heart of the downtown, and was just a few blocks from the hotel where the rest of PC Mali was staying. His apartment looked just like an American apartment. He had a great entertainment system, but most excitingly, a WASHING MACHINE! And a dryer. We did a little laundry every day. Four volunteers from Senegal and one from Benin were staying there was well. He was a great host and we were really glad we decided to do the homestay rather than the hotel.



Peace Corps Mali did really well in the tournament itself. We were late registering so we had only one team, in the competitive bracket, but the rest of us had a great time going to their games and cheering them on. After a four-game winning streak we were defeated by a bunch of high schoolers, but we figure, hey, those kids actually practiced!



At the end a bunch of the volunteers from Mali went down to the Petite Cote, the area of Senegal with the nicest beaches, and rented a house for a few days in a town called Popenguine. It was so much fun, so relaxing, and very inexpensive.



I ended up flying back to Mali. After encountering volunteers who left before we went to the beach to go overland and ended up in Bamako at the same time as me, and hearing their stories, I am glad.



There was lots of stuff going on at my site before I left, but I don't really feel like going into that now. I'm going back tomorrow, so maybe I'll write about village when I go back to Sikasso again.