Now in Senegal

My last blog post was forever ago (well, OK, almost exactly 2 years) and I have intermittently had dreams of filling this blog in with all the travels in the meantime - Tanzania several times, Senegal several times, Thailand several times, Cambodia twice, Vietnam, South Africa, Malawi..... but if I wait until I have time to fill it all in, I will never blog again.
So here I am, at (almost) the beginning of 2012, with a new baby - well, sort of new - Jeremiah Benjamin (JB) will be 6 months old tomorrow, and a new job - resident advisor for CDC to the President's Malaria Initiative in Senegal. So I'm starting  my family the way I was raised - in a French-speaking west African country, and I'm overjoyed to be here!
So where are we? Dakar, Senegal (Link: <http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=206569088713768905760.0004b91a014f6861d8854&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=18&vpsrc=6>), in a neighborhood called Fenetre Mermoz. How did we get here? Plane, car, ... I accepted a job (ok, honestly, I asked for it and some nice people said yes) as I mentioned before, as the CDC Resident Advisor for PMI Senegal. I had been traveling to Senegal several times per year to support the program, came to love Senegal and my co-workers there, and saw the interesting things happening here, and it seemed like a good fit on a number of levels.
While Ed and I had been talking about working internationally since before we got married, it was admittedly a little bit more of a stretch for Ed when it came to doing it - and not going to some English speaking place with great safari opportunities (like Tanzania) like we had talked about, but to a French-speaking ... desert. OK, well there are a fair number of trees and plants, but there is an awful lot of sand! In addition, the chances of both having a job in the same place are somewhat slim. Having JB in the picture suddenly made it make a bit more sense - we could afford one career, a nanny ... and end up with more of a family-friendly life style than we had in the US. I'm grateful for a husband willing to ditch a job he loved and step out into the great unknown, with no firm plans as to what he would do. As we'll see in coming weeks, he's not bored. :)
We've been here for 6 weeks now, and feels simultaneously much shorter and much longer. We  might finally be settled by about a year! Everything seems to take a little longer - partly being in west Africa where things are a little harder to come by, but having a baby around, not having a vehicle, not knowing our way around town. But we'll get there!
We have been so blessed to be a 5 minute walk from an English speaking church where we already have a number of good friends, a 3 minute walk from a couple we had made friends with last time I was in Senegal (and when Ed came for the "yay or nay" visit) who have a baby boy just 2 weeks older than JB, and just around the corner from fruit sellers, a bakery, a gelato place, and a little grocery store. It's also a 3 minute walk to the road that hugs the cliff along the coast, and on cool mornings, it's a beautiful run.
I'm hoping to post short posts regularly - to avoid building up into a monumental task!