Wednesday, February 1 Getting my feet on the ground

When I went to bed last night, I thought it was 10:30, but I had the time difference wrong, so it was actually 11:30. I woke up at what I thought was 6:20, but it was actually 7:20. OK, so this time zone thing apparently has me a little confused, but I think I’ve got it sorted it out now.

Kitchen and dining room of the apartment where I am staying on the SIL center

After shaving and showering with hot water—still appreciating that blessing!—I began planning my day. I needed to get some local currency because I was lined up for a visit to the cloth market at the end of the working day (more about that a bit further along), so I knew I needed to make a trip to a bank. But first, I had to find out where the nearest bank was located. My debit cards are MasterCard-branded and there was some uncertainty about whether I’d be able to use anything other than a Visa card in the local ATMs, so I also brought US dollars in cash with me to exchange in the event my card wouldn’t work.

As I emerged from my apartment at what I thought was 8:45 or so, I was met by Sophie, the guesthouse manager. After introducing herself and inquiring about my health, my trip, and so on, she pointed to a nearby door and told me that people would soon be congregating there for coffee break. When I asked what time coffee break happened and was told “10 o’clock”, I received my first clue that my calculation of the local time was an hour off. I hadn’t yet figured out or been shown where the offices were located on the Center, so I decided that coffee break was as good a place as any to begin meeting those who serve with SIL here.

The first two people I met, however, were visitors just like me. They had come for the dedication of a New Testament for a people group in the extreme eastern part of the country, where longtime friends of theirs had labored for close to 20 years to translate God’s Message into that community’s heart language. They were leaving to return to the US this evening. As I was talking with them, another man came and sat down next to me. I didn’t recognize him until he introduced himself—one of the local IT guys whom I had gotten to know when I served as a Language Technology Consultant in Burkina Faso almost 10 years ago now. It was good to see Mark again, and after coffee break was over, he took me to the office building and gave me a brief tour, along with the passcode to get in. He also gave me what I needed to prepare a meal for myself whenever I wanted it: couscous and a beef curry sauce, along with a small container of yogurt.

I found out from Mark that there is a bank a few blocks from the SIL Center, so after my tour at the office, I decided to walk there and exchange the dollars I had brought. (I thought I had a better chance of coming back with local currency that way than by attempting to use the ATM. In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to take my debit cards with me.) As I’ve come to expect in Africa, there was an armed guard at the door of the bank. He asked to see inside the bag I was carrying, and when he was satisfied that I had nothing threatening in it, he allowed me to enter. There was a woman at a desk just inside the door, so I approached her to ask about exchanging dollars. Her response took me by surprise: “We don’t exchange dollars here, only euros.” It was so unexpected that my brain couldn’t process what she had said; I had to ask her to repeat it. It took me a few moments to recover from this unexpected piece of news, but I eventually learned that there was a bank in town where I could exchange dollars. I made a mental note of that for tomorrow.

Then I inquired about the ATM that I thought I had seen in a separate little building just beside the bank. I asked if I could use a MasterCard card in it and was told that I could use any card at all. So I decided to return to my room, get my debit cards and come back to try my luck with the ATM. 10-15 minutes later I was back at the bank, and to my great surprise—I’m easily amazed, it seems—the transaction went perfectly. I came out of that little building with a wad of bills in the local currency. Technology really is amazing sometimes! Imagine making a withdrawal from my bank thousands of miles away and getting the cash in a currency that most employees at that bank wouldn’t even recognize if they saw it!

After stashing my newly gained tangible wealth in my room, I went to the SIL office to see who I might see there. I met Mark’s wife, Audrey, who had some banknotes from Guinea-Bissau for me that I had requested to satisfy the appetites of some of my numismatic buddies. (If you don’t already know it, I help paper-money collectors get items for their collections from various countries in West Africa, and Guinea-Bissau seems to be one of the most challenging places to get money from.)

While in Audrey’s office, I met quite a few other people who serve with SIL in Senegal: Colin, a friend from some time back because he used to work in Burkina Faso; Sue, who showed me how to get to the cloth market; Andrew and Kathy, husband and wife who share offices with Mark and Audrey, respectively; Rebecca, who will be helping at the upcoming Rapid Word Collection workshop; and probably some others whose names and faces I’ve forgotten because I met them so briefly and my brain was jetlagged.

Mark loaned me an adapter so I could transfer the pictures from my tablet to my computer, where I could resize them for my blog and email them to Anita to post. He also tested my phone charger and confirmed that it is not working. So tomorrow I’ll have to shop for a replacement charger. That shouldn’t be a difficult thing to find here, but that’s tomorrow’s story.