A Lebou fishing village

Horse carts - they are very common here

Luke found a baby bird that was abandoned. He wanted to keep it, but after reading info off the internet decided to put it back where he found it. We read that it was a myth that if you touch a bird, its mother will abandon it. When he checked back a couple of hours later, it was gone.

Sorry it has been so long since our last post. Since Ron was away while I was working hard at language :) he has been catching up with his lessons. Since we are going to be away for 2 weeks we are going to have to work hard to retain and practice what we have learned so far! Right now we are so in limbo - we aren't great in either language. I struggle with patience in my language learning, but are having more fun learning Wolof than I did French. When we get back from Kenya we are going to be heading into the Lebou villages each week and will get lots of practice talking and listening.

This past weekend we headed downtown, which is a rare treat due the heavy traffic and lots of people. But, this weekend was the annual pilgrimage to Touba. There are several brotherhoods of Islam. One of the biggest ones are the Morides (that may be spelled wrong). There are millions of Muslims in that group. Once a year they head to a city called Touba to worship their leader who lives there. The traffic is great while they are gone and you are encouraged to travel downtown. Also this past weekend was the big softball tournament where several teams from Dakar Academy were playing. It was a fun time of hanging out and rooting for our teams - 2 of our teams ended up in the championship round. Although it was very windy and chilly, it was a fun weekend.

Wednesday we are heading to Nairobi, Kenya for Ron's classes for his degree program. We will take around 9 days of vacation and then starting Friday the 27th he will do his class at a Christian retreat center, Brackenhurst. The kids will play, explore, and do school work while we are doing classes and meeting with the professors and their wives. During our week of vacation we will mostly likely not have regular internet. We will try to check in as often as we can. We are looking forward to this time of exploring the area of Kenya - one highlight that we know we are doing is camping at a game park reserve. The kids are pretty excited about that! We will take lots of pictures!