I'm in Dakar

I have arrived safely in Dakar, Senegal. It was a LONG car trip, and we took three days to do the more than 27 hours of driving. This wasn't like a road trip in the USA though. Some of the roads were amazingly good, they seemed quite newly paved and there was even a little shoulder on the side if someone needed to pull over. Other stretches of road were awful, so broken-up that we had to slow to almost a stop and weave around the potholes. There are no "rest stops" here, no public bathrooms, if you need to go you bring some tp with you and either find a bush to squat behind or ask someone if there might be a place to use. I was permitted to go at one hole-in-the-floor toilet where they provided me with a little kettle of hand washing water, but they asked for payment of 50 francs. (10 cents) At one town we stopped in I asked at a shop and the friendly shopkeeper allowed me to go in the back through their office and into a surprisingly nice bathroom - there was a western style toilet and a sink with soap. Soap!
It was so much nicer traveling in a car with friends than going on a bus, but I am exhausted nonetheless.
Once we crossed into Senegal from Mali I did notice some differences right away. A lot of things are the same, but other things remind me that I'm not home in Mali. There are a lot of horses here, we saw herds in fields and in towns there are lots of horse-drawn carts. Where we live in Mali its pretty much all donkeys. I noticed that a lot of people in villages have thatched roof houses, in Mali its usually just the round grain storage huts that have thatched roofs. There are way more mosques, and some of them are huge and ornate. The main people group and language here is Wolof. The cost of living is higher here, gas in Mali is 600 francs a liter, in Senegal its 800. Some imported things are cheaper here though because they don't have to be transported as far. Coming into Dakar was a bit overwhelming - the roads and traffic were crazy, much worse than Bamako. I really like my town where the reason you'd get stopped in traffic would be because some cows are crossing the street.
My first trip to Africa was to Senegal, I spent 6 weeks here in 2005 for my outreach. It is easier for me now because I can speak French.
I'm staying for now at the home of a very kind lady from Switzerland. I'll go out with her tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to visiting the medical clinic that she works at here. I may get a chance to visit the base that is out of the city later next week.