Tag Archives: senegal

beautiful buildings of Dakar

Posted in travel by

I am a big fan of midcentury design in general and a huge fan of midcentury African architecture in particular. There seems to be a huge range of styles, each drawing from different regions, periods, and influences. I’ve been calling it all Midcentury African for now and promising myself to look for actual terminology and history later, whenever I find the time to go down that rabbit hole.

For months I’ve been taking pictures of my favorite of these buildings in Dakar and it’s high time I shared them… Continue reading →

masse critique, or something like that

Posted in French by

tricolore fireworks.jpg

Last night I went out for drinks with three native French speakers, including one Parisian. (This is significant because Parisians speak three times as quickly and enunciate half as much as Senegalese.) We spent three hours gabbing away, during which my fairly infrequent mis-comprehensions were quickly smoothed over and my more frequent mispronunciations never stopped the conversation short. As is my wont when my French is going well, I had a moment of exiting my body and looking down at myself from above with a nearly overwhelming sense of pride and astonishment. I felt like I had crossed over some great divide and earned my stripes as an official French speaker, though I couldn’t tell you where or when the transition happened.

The ironic thing is that the precise moment I wandered off into the clouds to pat myself on the back was the same one in which the person I was talking to abruptly switched gears to ask whether I could understand him. He probably noticed my eyes looking through him into the middle distance of fantasyland. I assured him that yes, I had understood everything, but in fact, you can’t understand what you haven’t actually listened to.

In English, when I find my way back to a conversation after becoming distracted, I can do a sort of rewind to the last thing I missed, because my ear processed the words even if my mind didn’t. I operate sort of like my sound recorder, which is capable of capturing audio starting 2 seconds before I hit the record button. (I have NO IDEA how this works.) But in French, if I miss something, I can’t get it back, because it was never there to begin with. The sounds flittered through my subconsciousness, yes, but my brain never bothered turning them into words.

So, in that respect, I’m still stunted in my French. But who cares, because when I actually pay attention to what people are saying, I can understand the words coming out of their mouths. I can understand words which were once meaningless gobbledygook.

It’s pure and utter magic. (Magic that took a lot of work.)

[Photo: Kurt Bauschardt]

home again, home again

Posted in le week-end, travel by

IMG_7071.JPG

Landed back in Dakar on Wednesday morning at 3am, two hours late and in the midst of a downpour. It was hotter and more humid, by a long shot, than I’ve yet experienced here. And it has continued to be stifling and sweaty the rest of this week.

Still, it’s nice to be back. I call this place home, but it only halfway feels like it because of how much time I’ve spent out of town since I first arrived. It would have felt like cheating to skip out on Senegal’s rainy season altogether. And the speed with which I dispensed with my money during my one month of vacation had started to worry me. Especially after I got word, halfway through the trip, that the job I was supposed to start tomorrow has been delayed indefinitely. Eeks.

I’m now waiting to hear about three separate video projects, in Benin, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso. I would be thrilled to do any of them, not only for the work but also for the travel. I figured going to three new countries in the space of five weeks would calm my wanderlust but it only fueled it. In Ethiopia, my friend and I started calling out names of countries we wanted to visit and we didn’t stop until we had basically listed everywhere on earth. Just saying the names of those places out loud and rapid-fire got me tipsy with euphoria. And in Johannesburg, I hung out with a group that included a guy who told a story about borrowing his mom’s bakkie (South African slang for a 4X4, derived from Afrikaans) to go on camping safari in the Botswanan Kalahari. My eyes were like saucers and I informed him, “If you ever go again, I am coming with you. It doesn’t matter when. Just let me know, and I will be there.” And then everyone else wanted in, and it was agreed: 2017 Botswana road trip.

BOTSWANA ROAD TRIP. What kind of amazingness is my life right now, that that is an actual thing that could actually happen? What kind of transcendental awesomeness is it that I could tell myself – and realistically mean it – that when I return to Southern Africa to go to Botswana, I should add at least four weeks on to the trip in order to properly see the parts of South Africa I missed this time around, to climb the orange sand dunes of Namibia, and to check out Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia while I’m at it. And to maybe fly to Madagascar, too.

Of course, that’s all dependent on me getting my next job so that I can finance such craziness. So for now I will stay happily put in Dakar, hustling and crossing fingers for good news.

I’ll post vacation pix here as soon as I sift through them all…

In the meantime, have a good weekend!

P.S. Here are two cute things I read today:

How kids around the world get to school.

Lost luggage goes to America’s greatest thrift store. 

on teranga

Posted in foreign food festival, travel by

gateau.JPGAll week, I have been almost-crying with frustration as I attempt to upload videos for my client in New York. My average network speed ranges from 1MB per minute to 1MB per seven minutes. Not joking. Really, really not joking. My host brother has a different service provider that goes at about 2MB per minute, which is much better, except that the uploads frequently crash. Even when uneventful, it still takes hours upon hours to get a file of less than 1GB into the digital ether. (Faster connections exist, but I can’t access them because of the neighborhood I live in. And I can’t borrow them either, because all my people with better connections are away on vacation this week.)

The ongoing upload debacle has slowed everything else down during a week when I’m frantically trying to get things done before I leave on vacation tomorrow morning. One of my errands was to print all my itineraries and reservations. There’s a shop near Cor Coumba cafe where you can hop on their computer and do printouts. I rushed in there a few hours ago ready to get to business and cross one of eight million things off my to-do list.

When I stepped behind the counter (because you’re borrowing the store’s computer as opposed to using one reserved for the public), I saw that the three employees were sitting around a shared bowl of thieboudienne. They immediately told me, “Viens manger.” I thought I might have misheard, because why would strangers invite a random person to join them in their meal – especially a meal made more intimate by everyone eating with their hand from one bowl.

I demurred. They said it again. My mood shifted from frazzled to touched. (But I still demurred, because I had just eaten and because even though it may or may not have been polite to turn them down, I just really was not in the mood for fish.)

I did my printing. On my way out they offered me attayah. Again, I was really touched, but again I declined as politely as possible. I actually don’t know why I said no this time, because I really like attayah. I think I was just in must-get-shit-done mode.

But on the walk home, I thought about how Senegalese teranga – hospitality – makes up for all the times I’ve wanted to punch a wall because the Internet is simply not moving an inch.

Back at the house, I smelled something delicious wafting from the kitchen, and Tantie told me, “I made you a cake.” She loves baking but I’ve never been able to eat any of her confections because there’s always wheat flour in them. This time she used my gluten-free saracen (buckwheat), which after lots of searching I had recently found at a supermarket geared towards ex-pats.

I am not sure if the cake was because I am about to leave town for a month or just a well-timed coincidence, but either way I thought it was a really sweet gesture.

I cannot wait to be done with my uploads and on vacation in a new-to-me part of the world tomorrow, but I’m really going to miss my adopted family and my adopted neighborhood and Senegal in general. Somehow the planet-sized ball of molten Internet hate eating away at me this week has been sublimated, by their heart and by the otherwise-amazingness of living here.

P.S. There’s no way I’m going to get around to writing anything else here before I leave (and probably not while I’m away, either), so have a lovely August and see you in a month!

5 things foreigners should know before going anywhere in Dakar

Posted in travel by

1. Even if by some small miracle you have an exact address for your destination, it will be useless.

Technically, most streets in Dakar have official names and most houses have official numbers. But if there are no street signs on the actual roads and no numbers on the actual houses, they’re not going to do you much good. When Google Maps can’t even tell you where a specific address is (which I’ve found to be the case 9 times out of 10), don’t expect a man on the street to be able to. Except for the very biggest thoroughfares, people don’t know or use the proper names of roads. The “ancienne piste,” for example, has a real name but I have no idea what it is.

Which brings me to…

2. You must know the landmarks near where you’re going, or you will get lost. (You’ll get lost anyway, but it will be less painful if you know what else exists near your destination.)

That’s why instead of giving taxi drivers my cross-streets, I ask them to take me to Bourguiba (my neighborhood’s main road) between Saveur d’Asie, a restaurant, and Casino, a supermarket.

A few months ago, I went to someone’s house for the first time. Instead of providing me with any sort of address, he instructed me:

From the VDN [highway], go past the Citydia in Liberté 6 ext, take a right at the pharmacy across from the mosque, and call me from the empty lot on the left.

Spy movie or just another day in Dakar? You decide. (Incidentally, there are many Citydias, many pharmacies, many mosques, and many empty lots in Dakar. Once in the general vicinity of his apartment, I became woefully turned around and had to call back several times to play guessing games: “Pass by the Citydia while on the VDN or on the access road?” “Is it a green mosque or a white mosque?” “Are you talking about the pharmacy in the middle of the street or at the end of the street?”…)

3. You can’t trust addresses you find on the Internet.

I once painstakingly made my way to a faraway side street on which Google Maps had promised me there was a bakery. It turned out to be a random residence. When I needed to visit the Liberian Embassy for a visa, Google searches turned up three different locations for it. None of them were correct. I would suggest that you always call a place before visiting, to confirm that it is in the location you think it is, but good luck with that! If you can manage to find a phone number online, it’s often incorrect, or no one picks up.

4. You’re going to take taxis a lot; know the rules.

– You must negotiate the price before getting in the car, or you’ll get ripped off. Whatever they quote you at the outset is usually 25%-50% more than you should pay. It’s a buyer’s market, and I’ve found that if I step away from a taxi after offering them a fair price that they initially turn down, they’ll call me back and wave me into the car, which basically means, “Alright, you win.”

– You must know exactly where you’re going and how to get there, because your taxi driver often won’t (and may pretend he does and then drive around in circles while calling his friends to ask them where to go). In my experience, showing a taxi driver a map and pointing to your destination doesn’t work, because most of them don’t know how to read maps. By this point I know much of Dakar well enough to direct drivers street by street, and they are neither surprised nor insulted when I tell them, “Tournez à gauche là... tout droit… C’est par ici…” Think of Dakar as the exact opposite of London, where taxi drivers have to pass “the knowledge,” and do your homework before you get in the cab.

– Many taxi drivers don’t speak French, but they’ll fake it ’til you make it into their car, and then you’ll spend the entire ride trying to communicate in French while they answer in Wolof. Not worth it. Politely turn down the ride and wait for another one. (If you speak Wolof, good for you! I speak six words of it, most of them borrowed from French.)

– Though Dakar’s taxis may look universally run-down, there is a difference between run-down but running, and run-down to the point of breaking down en route. I’ve learned this the hard way. If a taxi approaches that looks unfit to ride in, wave it on. There will be plenty of others behind it.

And finally, the most important thing to know before attempting to get any place in Dakar:

5. The Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

When I feel like bashing my head against a wall because of how unnecessarily maddening it is to get to where I’m going, I take a deep breathe and remind myself that Dakar is a journey, not a destination.

laundry days in Dakar

Posted in travel by

Laundry was included in the cost of my homestay, so during my first month in Senegal, I’d leave the washerwoman (who I’ve never actually seen) a basketful of dirty clothes on Monday and get them back clean by Friday. I’d hand-wash my underwear and socks myself, in the shower because I’m lazy. (But not while wearing them! I’m not that lazy.)

The first few times I got my laundry back, I didn’t notice any problems, but soon enough I started finding tiny holes and broken seams in my tank tops, and my formerly tight t-shirts started fitting like maternity wear. Knowing I would probably ruin it all through work and travel, I had only brought my most worn-out and least loved clothing to Senegal, so I didn’t really mind the damage. But when it got so bad that I had to throw stuff out, I realized that my already tiny wardrobe was dwindling too quickly and I would soon run out of things to wear. So I decided to wash my clothing myself.

Every other weekend, I set aside 2 or 3 hours to do my laundry. My technique and my set-up has improved over time: I now use one bucket for pre-soaking, a washbasin with a built-in washrack for scrubbing, another bucket for rinsing, and a final one for wringing. I’ve learned to go easy on the washrack, since my overzealousness at first caused just as much stretching and created just as many snags as the washerwoman had. I’ve switched from gentle-on-the-skin baby wash to chemical-laden but much easier to use laundry soap. And I’ve discovered that I can stream the radio from my cell phone without any Internet connection, so I listen to mbalax on the sunny third floor terrace while telling myself that hand-washing is meditative as opposed to mind-numbing.

(Not to mention finger-busting. By the end of each laundry set, my hands are frozen into the shape of fists and every slight movement of my fingers sends jolts of pain coursing up my arms.)

As with other facets of settling in to Dakar (getting Internet access, topping up phone credit, figuring out how to get around, etc.), I didn’t realize until very late in the game that there is an easier option than the one I defaulted to because it was the first thing that became apparent or was suggested to me. Mamie informed me recently that there are laundromats – with washing machines you can operate yourself – in Dakar. I’m guessing they must be the “blanchisserie“s that I see all over and had taken at face value (or rather, at literal translation value) as places where you get your whites bleached. They could also be the “pressing“s, which are even more common than blanchisseries and which I had assumed were places where you get your clothes dry cleaned and ironed. (I had half-wondered why bleaching and ironing shops were ubiquitous but laundries non-existent… But there are so many things I half-wonder about here, all vying for attention from my overworked brain, and this one just wasn’t important enough to make the leap from giving my consciousness pause to compelling it to pursue an answer.)

It’s taken me so long to discover the better, faster, easier way to do so many things here, that I suspect there’s a part of me that prefers the more time-consuming and complicated way. Perhaps that’s because in the still more-analog-than-digital environment of Dakar, I am rediscovering the hidden benefits of boredom. If I stop hand-washing my clothes, I’ll save a lot of time, but I’ll also lose 3 hours of mindless, repetitive motion that gets the wheels of my creative brain turning.

Have a love and disco-filled weekend!

Posted in le week-end, travel by

Ngor bench

This week I visited Ile de Ngor, one of three islands just off the coast of Dakar. We took a five-minute ride across the water on a motorized pirogue and landed on a picturesque beach with lovely views of the city.

ngor_view

We ate lunch, walked around the island, and lay on beach mats that you can rent for less than $2. (Not the “royal” we, btw – I was with a friend that I made through this very blog!) I attempted to read French fashion magazines, with limited success. It was a peaceful and relaxing getaway.

This weekend promises to be similarly low-key, aside from a still-tentatively-planned Senegalese wrestling match on Sunday. If I go, I’ll report back…

In the meantime, here are some interesting recent reads/views to start your weekend:

French chefs and refugees team up for an unusual food festival in Paris.

The most commonly misused English words. Apparently I’ve been using “bemused” incorrectly.

Traditional wedding dresses around the world. The bridal headwear in some of these puts American veils to shame.

Walking while black.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link about the Olympics refugee team. Meet the team members.

Eater’s list of the best Paris restaurants. #33 speaks to me. 

Atlas Obscura’s guide to an entomologist’s dream vacation. 

Linguists dissect and analyze Hillary and Donald’s speech patterns.

Jokes from young people around the world. I like the Norwegian one.

Syrian refugees in Greece put their tent on Airbnb, promising scorpions, dehydration and ‘broken promises’

How a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook – written by a man who spoke terrible English – became a cult comedy sensation.

Silencing the auto-correct in your head.

And finally, my friend shared this video from the 1979 World Disco Finals on Facebook during the Republican National Convention, and it restored my faith in humanity.

This weekend, remember: we were born to be alive. Don’t let the hate get you down, and do some good living!

[Photos: Isabella Ssozi]

my side gig: drug pusher

Posted in travel by

Recently I’ve formed a new habit.

Any time Mamie or Tantie complains of an ailment, I pipe up, “I have something you can take for that!”

First it was Mamie with her constant stomach problems. After finding her moaning on the couch post-meal one too many times, I plied her with charcoal tablets to absorb whatever bad stuff she had eaten. Another day I gave her some of my “gluten defense” pills, just in case it’s gluten intolerance she’s suffering from. A third time, I handed over a full sheet of Pepto-Bismol chewables. And she knows where I keep my Immodium, just in case she ever needs it.

Then Tantie started complaining about an on-again off-again cold. I asked her if she thought it might be allergy-related and when she said, “Maybe,” I encouraged her to try my Claritin. And I assured her that if her sniffles made it hard to get to sleep she could always take one of my Nyquils.

Today Mamie came home squealing in anguish after a teeth-whitening session. No sooner had I read online that Aleve could be used to relieve the pain, than I jumped up and headed for my bulging medicine bag. “I’ve got that!” I cried triumphantly while holding the bottle aloft.

That was the moment I realized I have a problem.

You can walk into any Senegalese pharmacy and buy a bunch of powerful medicine for which you’d need a prescription in the United States. But the Senegalese don’t seem to use drugs with the frequency that Americans do. I’ve noticed this even when it comes to stimulants as mild as tea and coffee. While I refuse to do anything before I have my espresso, the Senegalese get on with their caffeine-free lives, drinking nothing but attayah – green tea – at midday, and impotent cafe touba in the morning and evening. They don’t seem to medicate stomaches, headaches, or colds – at least not the people I’ve met (admittedly a small sample size). My host family didn’t even have a thermometer when I wanted to take my temperature last week.

I consider myself a drug-averse individual, and yet I just counted all the drugs I came armed with to Senegal, plus the ones I have picked up here in Dakar, and the grand total is 21. I have more drugs here than underwear.

But the stockpile itself isn’t what bothers me. When it comes to my own usage, I’ve only taken a handful of drugs since arriving, and I keep the rest around only in case of emergency. What’s disturbing is how I’m all too enthusiastic about pushing them on everyone else, even when they are barely called for. I get this gleeful feeling every time I put drugs into someone’s hands, as though I am a caped superhero bearing otherwise-elusive pain relief. My self-worth shouldn’t come from perceiving myself as a helper, and my self-perception as a helper certainly shouldn’t come from offering controlled substances to people.

So, for my personal psychological growth if nothing else, as of today I’m imposing a moratorium on offering unsolicited drugs to others. Let them sneeze, let them grip their stomachs, let them knead their foreheads – unless they come to me asking for the drugs by name, Ruth’s American medicine chest is now off-limits to everyone but myself.
_____

Addendum: I wrote this post and then went downstairs to eat dinner before actually posting it. Within a three-minute span of time, Mamie came back from the hair salon and reported that the Aleve had miraculously taken away all her tooth pain, and Tantie breezed in to tell me that my allergy pills “worked really well” and that she feels “much better.” It may be too late to cut off their supply… Looks like I’ve already created two monsters.

[Photo: Steven Depolo]

coffee chronicles

Posted in foreign food festival, travel by

An update on my quest to find freshly brewed coffee in Dakar:

A while ago, Tantie (Mamie’s younger sister; real name Armand) recommended I try Presse Cafe, in the neighborhood of Plateau. After three caffeination-starved months in Dakar, the sight of their bean grinders and espresso machines felt like spotting a unicorn.

I now stop in to the cafe every time I’m downtown, but it’s too far to go for my daily fix. Fortunately, I recently discovered an even better place right in my own backyard.

A ten-minute walk from my house, through the dusty pastel streets of Amitié, an inconspicuous shop called Coumba Cafe does their own roasting and grinding and brews an uber-strong cup of espresso topped with a perfect layer of crema (a word I learned only during my recent coffee obsession).

The first time I drank one tiny shot of it, I had to down a liter of water and eat a banana to calm the coffee shakes. Tremors aside, it was heavenly to be so wide awake.

Now I’m a regular there. I love their decidedly non-cafe-like decor and that they’ve been around since the 80s.

For less than a dollar, I get my espresso fix from someone who knows my order without me saying a word. Apparently they make a delicious version of cafe touba that, unlike the kind sold on the street, actually wakes you up, but so far I have stuck to the espresso because I don’t really believe in a world in which cafe touba possesses powers of caffeination. Maybe one Saturday when I don’t have any work to do I’ll try it out.

On that note, I’m heading there now because my brain is still not fully functional and it’s after 12pm!

here comes the rain

Posted in best words & worst words, travel by

Last Thursday night it drizzled, and after five months in Senegal with nary a drop of rain, the scent of freshly-wet earth read to my nostrils as one of the loveliest smells in the world.

Today I got caught in another teeny tiny shower and realized that for the first time since arriving here, I’m going to have to start checking the weather report. The rainy season is upon us, and Mamie warns me that it will be “dégueulasse” when the water overflows the gutters and everything turns to mud.

But for now I feel positively Gene Kelly-like. And I’m excited about the prospect of using my second-favorite French word, parapluie (umbrella, topped only by pamplemousse, grapefruit), as frequently as possible.