Departing email

Hello all, The time has come! I leave for beautiful Senegal tomorrow night. I spent the past week with Mom, Dad and Margo in Ithaca, which was a nice way to start the summer. I'm at Cornell right now, just about done with our three-day orientation with Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW). I'm brushing up on my French, learning a couple of Wolof greetings, getting a feel for the status of the solar oven project, and trying to breathe deeply and move slowly to avoid profuse sweating and panicking in this heat! To refresh your memory/tell you for the first time, I will intern with the non-government organization CRESP Senegal for ten weeks, beginning June 3rd and ending August 15th. I plan to learn about solar ovens and then work directly with the Senegalese who have been promoting their use in Senegal over the past 20 years. When I arrive in Dakar/Yoff on Saturday at 11 at night, Max, a member of CRESP, will be at the airport to pick me up and take me to my host family to get a lot of sleep. He'll be wearing a white baseball cap so that I recognize him, which I find very cute. The nature of this internship is such that the first couple weeks will really be spent just acclimating myself to the village of Yoff. I'll solidify project goals slowly, making sure not to jump into things before understanding what is driving the solar oven project. As far as I know, I will be traveling alone, but there will be 4 other North American volunteers there this summer, as well as about twenty Senegalese volunteers. So, with this brief email to open what I expect will be a summer full of contact, I wish you a wonderful summer and thank you so much for your support! Hugs, Melissa