Senegal Stories
Class Afloat, looking to give back and learn more from some of the communities that we dock in, started a program called West African Initiative. Here, we get the chance to work with a Senegalese youth group on different projects: some related to culture, and others to aid. Mostly, the exchange is a way for us to become travelers, and not simply tourists… an opportunity to become much more conscious and aware of the non-Western world, and for us to forge alliances with the Senegalese. While most of our ports-of-call keep us for a few days shy of a week, we stay for 10 days in Dakar to fully enable our cultural learning experience to take place. My first impression of the Senegalese capital is that it is of an unbearable temperature. The mercury reaches 42 degrees Celsius on the same day that my Calgarian friends are on the map for being in the one of the coldest places on Earth, second only to Antarctica. Never have I been more Canadian – the heat exhaustion I suffer from makes me long