I am back!

I am back from Senegal.
I was there for 3 weeks. Time flies!
I didn't want to leave if I could.
The children at the orphanage where I was are angels! They don't have many things like kids in Japan and the U.S., but they are happy!
I think that's the true happiness. Their smiles healed me.

We didn't have electricity during the days or at nights almost everyday.
No hot water...
No extra stuff at all, but they are all happy.

It was a life learning experience for me.
Now, I appreciate a lot that we have water, hot water, electricity and those natural resources whenever we want as much as we want.

Introducing SAORI to the children was a big hit!
Everybody wanted to weave!
Whenever I was walking towards the weaving studio, some children followed me showing their interest in weaving.
Whenever they saw me, they did "weaving gesture" telling me "I want to weave!"
(They speak either Wolof or French and I couldn't speak neither of them...shame)
Yes, I couldn't speak their languages, but they taught me many vocabularies in Wolof and now I am very interested in keep learning Wolof.
Even though we couldn't communicate much, we were able to understand (I think) each other.
There are volunteers who could speak both French and English so thanks to them that they were sometimes translators for me.

But how wonderful that the boys and I were able to communicate with no words!
Eye contact, gestures, some wolofs that I didn't understand....but I anyway, we were able to communicate most of the time by our "HEARTS".

I miss all the boys calling me "Chakuri".
Well, spelling is wrong, but it became my Senegalese nickname and I liked it.
I miss all of the boys already. I don't know how many times I looked at the pictures I took while I was there.

I now hope that they keep enjoying SAORI and hope to be back there with more Wolof vocabularies in the near future with my husband Dan.

To be continued...