After a smooth and uneventful trip from Málaga to Madrid to Dakar, we finally arrived at our accommodation around midnight on Thursday. Our first encouragement of the day happened yesterday morning at breakfast time, before we had even met to pray and plan the day. Over breakfast, we got talking to some local missionaries here in Dakar, and they were able to give us the names of leaders of different churches, denominations and mission societies that we could meet with this week in order to share the vision and invite the involvement of more African youth when we bring our overseas teams to work in Senegal this summer. They also gave us names and contact numbers of mission guest houses with possible extra accommodation, so that we could make appointments to go and visit those in the afternoon. On our way to visit those locations, we stopped for lunch at a little restaurant with the very un-African name of "Colorado Grill" and the three of us from Spain had to laugh when we saw that the "plat du jour" was paella! We decided just to order some local fish (in coconut milk) instead. Here's a picture of Jean, posing in front of the restaurant.We made good contact with the people from the other mission houses, but often they only had accommodation for 12 or 20 people. As we're expecting to be 60-100 people in August, it would be nice to find one location where all the teams could be together. On Monday, we're going to look at another place that might have room for all of us. After another meeting last night with the president of the schools and universities' Christian Union groups in Senegal, we finally went to bed, very satisfied with the good fruit of our first day.
Today we'll continue to connect with different church denomination and missions leaders, with the particular goal of forming good partnerships and encouraging the involvement of Senegalese youth this summer.
