Waiting

The morning started out with frenzied packing, which I quickly left along with my catastrophe of a room when Jackie called me to say she had arrived early in Thies. I went to meet her at the Toubab store and we ran some errands. I had my usual fight over monetary change when we to pay our internet bills, but I kept it under control. The lack of change in this country is one of my biggest annoyances...

Almost all of the Thies girls came in today to discuss a girls summer camp that we're going to do, but before we could sit in a lovely air conditioned restaurant and eat good food we needed to renew our residency permits. I knew the general area of where this mysterious building was located so Jackie and I took off on the hunt. Initially we walked right past it and when I say initially I mean we walked right past it two minutes into looking for it and then it took us another 30 minutes to find it again...with the help of a very nice man from another government building. When we first saw the building we thought it was a house. Nope, it's where you get passports and residency permits.

There is already a big group of French people in front of us so we settle in and wait. Then Emily arrives, then Alys, and finally just as the guy is looking at our permits Katherine rolls up. He takes our permits into the back room for a while and then tells us we have to make copies of them since they are originally from Dakar. Obviously there's no copy machine at this office so we walk all the way across town and back. At this point I have little faith that I will end the day with a residency permit, but lo and behold two and half hours after Jackie and I first sat down we all had renewed residency permits. A Thies miracle.

The purpose of our rendez-vous was to discuss the girls summer camp that we want to hold before school starts up next fall. I was actually thoroughly impressed with the amount of planning that we got done today. The camp will be really cool if we can pull it off.

After the meeting I came back home to finish packing! I'm leaving tomorrow! This endeavor was made more difficult by a really annoying neighbor girl constantly trying to barge into my room. I preserved and will be ready to go in the morning!