In only 10 days I shall be in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Although it still seems ages away I remember how fast the last two years of school went by.

For the first couple of days we'll be staying with our rep in Dakar so that we can get our visas sorted. After that, the six of us are going to Kaolack to learn some Wolof! (For those of you who don't know, Wolof is a widely spoken African language in Senegal). Then, after a couple of weeks in, Ciara (my partner) and I will make our way to Joal, our home for the next 11 and a half months.

Joal is a fishing town/village on the west coast of Senegal. While I am there I will be working as a TEFL teacher. (That stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language). Basically I'm teaching English to students between the age of 11 and 21. The classes are from about 60 students upwards. We will be living with Amadou Wone and his family. He is an English teacher at the school I am going to be teaching at. The cool thing is that we can cycle to work and the girls that were there last year managed to get bikes that we can use. I am looking forward to teaching but I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to be easy.

Another thing is that there is a hospital in the village that I can volunteer in. One of the girls that was there this last year tried to volunteer there but found it to difficult emotionally to spend a lot of time there. I think it will be a good test to see if I really want to go into the medical field.

That is all for now but I'll be sure to post another update when I get to Senegal. The internet access in Joal is fairly limited so I'll be writing lots of letters.