Last day in St Louis

So, today I have come to my favourite internet cafe next to "Nice Burger" for the last time ever. After 4 months in St Louis I am leaving, and very very sad about it. But I thought I'd give a potential last update of the blog while I still have reliable internet access.

4 months on, I really feel that St Louis is my home . . . I know all the areas, the best shops and stalls to by various items, the right price (not "toubab" price) to pay and all of the random characters of St Louis (scary one-legged man, creepy tongue man, bridge-shouting man, Hugh Fernly-Whittingstaw, Spanish trouser guy etc etc). And so the thought of leaving is really horrible.

But to look forward to, I have travelling. I leave tomorrow at 7am a sept-place to Dakar (the capital, 5 hours away) where Im staying just one night to visit la maison des esclaves (the slave house) which is supposedly beautiful and home to a nice museum about slavery. Incidentally, I am really missing museums so yesterday, for our second last day, Frances and I (the girl I am travelling with - from Sheffield, 19, going to Bristol to study French and Portugese) visited St Luois' only museum. It is a museum of Jean Mermoz, Aeropostale pilot, and Antoine Saint-Exupery, Aeropostale hanger-on and author of le petit prince etc.

After Dakar Frances, Liselle (who is bizarrely also from aberdeen) and I are travelling south to the Sine-Saloum delta where we will take a boat through the mangroves and sit by the beach. We are then continuing with a coastal tour of fishing villages and baobab trees. We are meeting 2 friends there so it will be a good group. Then Fran and I will leave the others and travel up the Gambia river, before heading to Casamance in the south for more of the same "tranquill" travelling.

We have decided in the end to stay in Senegal and Gambia as there is plenty to do for a month and all of Senegal's border countries, and thus potential travel destinations, read as follows on the foreign office website . . . Mali: Strongly not recommended for all but essential travel, risk of hijacking, terrorism, kidnapping, stabbing. Mauritania: Strongly not recommended for all but essential travel, risk of hijacking, terrorism, kidnapping, stabbing. Guinea: Strongly not recommended for all but essential travel, risk of hijacking, terrorism, kidnapping, stabbing. Guinea-Bissau: Strongly not recommended for all but essential travel, risk of hijacking, terrorism, kidnapping, stabbing. So in the end Senegal sounds good.

But returning to St Louis . . . over the last month since I last wrote I have been living quietly here with nothing too much to report. I have been working two days a week with street-children called "talibés". The whole concept is really fascinating. My first impression was that these were poor street children who beg for money etc but the reality is much more complex. They are boys who are sent from villages, often from fairly wealthy families, to learn the Koran from the religious leader, the "marabout". The Marabouts take up residence in abandonned buildings or just put a fences round a bit of ground and use that as the room where their boys sleep and learn the Koran. They are givebn no food, no clothes, no money and no education other than Koranic. They expected to beg for the above as a religious and humbling experience. The reality is often, therefore, horrible infections, malnutrition or even starvation and sometimes sexual abuse from the Marabouts. I have been with friends to help them in their project of working with a local doctor, basically picking off scabs, treating scabies and performing minor operations. I just dealt with the scabs which made me feel sick enough, but the boys who do it every day have seen some really awful cases and I think are finding it very difficult.

The project I have been working with in relation to this, however, is reaally positive. It is called "Daara vision Senegal" (the daaras being the places where the talibés live with the marabouts) and was set up by Papis, a local guy. It is only running in 2 daaras so far as the marabouts tend to be very suspicious of outsiders and unwilling to let them in. But in these 2 daaras, a volunteer goes in for 4 hours every day ( I do 2 days a week) and teaches numbers and french and plays games and washes clothes and does basic first aid. I could write pages about the 15 boys in the daara, they are such characters, ranging in age from 6 to 15. Oussmane, Denba, Aliou, Aliou, Samba, Mamadou, Mbaye, Solyeman, Zuberu, Samba, Omare, Douleil, Abdul-Aziz and Hamedou. The project is so amazing as they are so enthusiastic to learn, and you can see a real improvement as they learn to brush their teeth and wash and sew clothes etc.

I now have to go home for my last lunch with the family. I am so sad to go and am really going to miss them all. I hope it's Thiebouddienne for lunch.