It’s getting’ chilly!

It now is getting chilly at night here – down in the low 60s. All the Senegalese people think it’s really cold here now – the women bundle up in shawls and the boys and men wear pants for sure (the men regardless pretty much always wear pants, though boys/teenagers often wear shorts), and jackets, too, if they have them. I’ve started sleeping in pants and a long sleeve shirt at night – and usually end up pulling up my sheet over me by morning. It is so amazing. Literally AMAZING. I still get hot and sweaty (a bit) during the day – the sun is still hot for sure (weather.com claims it gets in the mid-90s here still…but it really doesn’t seem that hot!), but it cools off nicely by evening. If I don’t get a chance to take my (often second) bucket bath of the day until after the sun has set, I can almost get the goose-bumps. Almost. :) The guys in my compound run back to their room after their bucket baths at night with their “towel” (i.e. a big cut of fabric) wrapped around them tightly because they’re so cold. I can’t wait to be able to wear pants all day and feel comfortable in them (i.e. not really get hot at all, or at least not too much). I think that should happen pretty soon – certainly by January at least. I can’t wait. Everyone here thinks I’m crazy when I say that it feels so nice now that it’s so “cold” – I tell them it really is not cold here, it’s cold in my home in the States right now. I tell them to imagine being surrounded by ice (since many people don’t understand the word for snow, nor what it means/looks or feels like) – and that is what Minnesota is like now (not really, but it will be soon, and the word for “now” and “soon” are the same in Wolof, so it works). When I told Suckeye this, she just looked at me and said, “If I went to Minnesota, I would die.” And I said, “Yeah, well, you might, but you’d learn to just wear a lot of layers of clothes like we do, and then you’d be fine.” (Or I more or less said that in my somewhat broken Wolof. I think she got the idea, though.)