“Salaamaleykum!”

Wait… that’s Arabic. I was under the impression that I was only learning French and Wolof. Dear God. Or, rather: inshalaa. In French: S’il plaît à Dieu. In English: God willing. God willing, I’ll learn Wolof. And French. And the random bits of Arabic I’ll need to barter for a taxi and bribe a police officer, two very important skills we were taught in survival Wolof and safety orientation today, both apparently involving detailed sets of questions about the wellbeing of each other’s families in hybridized Wolof-Arabic.

So far, it’s been orientations, placement tests, and some time to wander this crazy new world. Over the course of the very first day I ricocheted across a whole spectrum of emotions: From oh my goodness, are those lights Dakar… just kidding, they’re the reflections of the plane wing – I think I may explode, to wow, this is a tiny airport with basically no security and really poor labeling. From why does it have to be raining as I wrestle with my two rolling bags, backpack and computer bag in the large-rock-filled mud to oh dear gracious, that is the call to prayer slipping over the silent dark city and it feels odd to break the sound with even the scuff of a foot in the ground. From um, this is a bit dirty and the one light that works takes about fifteen seconds to sputter on to um, this room has wireless internet! From good for me: I’ve downed about as much water today as I’ve had in the entire past month to I’m desperately thirsty, actually. From maybe I should have thought to bring a turban to maybe it would be okay to wear shorts after all. From I am going to have to shower about five times per day in this country to I want this country to stay in my skin… and right back to no, seriously, though, being continuously sweaty and grimy for four months is going to be an issue.

My first impression of Dakar is one of striking contradictions. There are palm-lined boulevards of the sort I imagine grace Hollywood, just minus the trash compressed across the curb, the precarious stalls crammed between the white stucco gates, the barbed wire mingling with the bright flowers spilling over outer walls, the goats and door-less painted buses crossing before a Rolls Royce. It’s simultaneously dusty and muddy – a thick reddish dirt that clings to every rut and shoe. A wonderfully nice young man showed some of my fellow wide-eyed Americans and myself the nearest mosque, a snow-white, twin-spired beauty rising out of a beach where children run barefoot and clothed in the powerful waves as men fix fishing nets and their colorful wood boats, where the sand is tossed together with a crushed cassette tape, a wad of cloth, a tear of car tire. It felt like anything I could imagine might turn up beneath my sandal or the naked toes of the people crowding around the surf.

We ate baguette with jam and nutella for breakfast, sharply spicy rice with what I found to be an alarming number of large bones in it for lunch, and pommes frites – french fries – for dinner.

And, of course, our little American unit has already managed to deal out our weekly dose of shocking cultural insensitivity. The brave few of us who decided not to sleep after our pre-dawn arrival (Dakar time, making it about midnight EST when our plane touched down) decided to keep ourselves awake with a soccer game – “le foot” to those in the know, of course. We invited two young boys, each of whom could have quite easily taken on all of us combined had they been even half our size, and quickly attracted another boy closer to our age. After some while of sprinting and dribbling and slamming into each other in the noon sun and salt-touched air (my participation involved rather more of the slamming aspect; having never played soccer my ball handling skills are notably inferior to my people handling skills), our Senegalese companion said softly that he was tired and would take a break.

“Oh yeah, j’ai fatigué aussi,” one of our American boys scoffed, and I can’t in honesty deny that the rest of us backed him up in our own posturing, panting ways. “I’m tired too – what about it?”

“No, no,” our new acquaintance said. “C’est Ramadan. C’est comme… Lent, for you.”

Right. Ramadan. That thing that we’ve been told at least a dozen times is going on right now. That thing that’s kind of like Lent, except that it involves not eating all day every day for a month. That thing that’s preventing the people preparing our food, which I’ve so disparaged for its lack of balanced nutrients (you know there’s a problem when you’re actually fantasizing about lettuce two and a half days after arrival), from having any of it themselves. That thing we managed to totally forget in our efforts to look like we might have soccer skills comparable to the legendary Africans.

But… there’s always progress to be made, right? And I have a new goal: become passable at soccer – or, rather, “le foot.” Inshalaa.