Dakar, Gorom, and Thies

Micah is our lone representative in the capital city, Dakar. Dakar is a busy metropolis with over one million inhabitants and Micah has had to learn to navigate bus routes and busy streets to make it to his morning service location at the Pouponniere Des Soeurs Franciscaines Missionaires De Marie, an orphanage. In the mornings Micah has been caring for infants, holding them, feeding them, and getting “mobbed” (his words) by them in the large playroom. You can check out some images from the playroom here and here. Micah usually heads to his grandmother’s house for lunch and spends a good bit of the rest of his day hanging out with his extended host family before returning home in the evenings. He has also been hanging out at the Centre Culturele Blaise Senghor where he has taken up drumming lessons with a master of the Sabar. You can check out an excerpt from one of his drumming lessons here.

Joelle and Kate have been living on the campus of a small clinic, the Poste de Sante Keru Yiiw. Keru Yiiw means “house of grace” and the clinic is part of a larger outreach effort organized by Youth With a Mission. The compound where they live includes the clinic and a small agroecology project that employs permacultural techniques to grow vegetables and trees. They are part of an international team that includes Congolese, Brazilian, Dutch, Senegalese and Swiss missionaries and live in a dormitory with other volunteers. They spend most of their time helping in the clinic but have also been helping out in the initial stages of a small pre-school program.

Alex and Erin continue to live and work in Thiès for service, expanding their familiarity of Senegal’s third largest city. They are working at Barthimee Hospital, which is a project of Mission Inter-Senegal. They volunteer on a rotating schedule in a variety of clinical practices including wound care, maternity, surgery and basic intake procedures such as taking vital signs.