Last weekend

This past weekend was pretty awesome and very busy.  We did Senecorps hiring interviews all morning on Saturday and on Sunday.  We interviewed a total of about 25 people, candidates for administrative, teaching and technology positions.  It went surprisingly well and my french comprehension usually manifested itself into a half page of notes per person.  It was surprisingly easy to tell who was qualified and who wasn't, but still felt difficult to have to turn people away.  We're holding second round interviews this coming weekend and will be judging lesson plans and administrative skills.  Its turning out to be a pretty comprehensive evaulation for each candidate, which is important considering how many people are interested.

The weekend was also the Journee Mondial de Jeuness Catholique, a Catholic festival for ton of West African youth.  Kids from Mali, Burkina, Mauritania etc were all bussed into the three Catholic schools in Thies and participated in a huge clebratory weekend.  I went to the concert on Saturday afternoon which consisted of a lot dancing and performances from different regional areas.  It was pretty interesting to hear Christian Ragae. 

Later that night, I ended up going to a neighborhood get-together planned by a bunch of high school-aged girls.  There was a giant semi-circle of chairs and standing audience members surrounding 7 or 8 male drummers.  Then in the center of the circle, different (usually teenage) girls would take turns dancing in the middle.  They would always face the drummers and approach them in a mating-dance sort of way and the drummers were playing towards the dancers.  Each girl would only dance for a minute or two before running back to her friends on the sidelines.  The dancing was incredible.  It involved so much movement and high kicking, I could imagine that each girl was getting pretty tired.  They would stamp their feet on the ground and move to the beat of the (very fast) drumming.  One girl tried to get me to dance (the sole tubaab present), but I assured here that there was absolutely no possible way that I could move the way she did. Phew.