Quick Update: I'm back in Dakar

Scarcely a few hours after I published my last post, which I'd drafted over the weekend, I thought over some things that I'd been dealing with since my arrival last Tuesday, and decided that my time in Soussane wasn't going to be worth it. Honestly, reading through that post with the knowledge that I get aggressively upbeat when I'm close to breaking makes it seem like a bit of a cry for help.

A big part of me also wanted to stay, but I also knew I was not doing anyone any favors by staying there. Soussane needs a lot of things, but an unskilled young intern who is treated like a china doll is not one of them, and I was not thriving there. The people in Soussane were wonderful, but a stomach bug, a general sense of frustration at the resources available to me there, and the fact that I'd had no warning or information about the site beforehand made me feel very frustrated at being sent there, and I was so upset Monday I was seriously considering going home. I was having some trouble adjusting to not having sufficient internet connection and electricity, which I'm pretty dependent on because I've built a lot of my research and writing habits around using my laptop.

So I'm back in Dakar this week, figuring things out with MSID and finding another place to work this semester. Rest assured, I'm still staying in Senegal until April, but I'll be doing something different. Thank you all for your continued support and readership.