Une serie d'événements ridicule

I managed to get sick again (Sunday the 10th, to be exact). This time I was cursed with a sinus infection. In addition to my nose, throat, and ears being in intense pain, the network of back muscles surrounding my formerly fractured spine decided to start cramping up and hurting really badly. So, for the second week now in my tenure here in Senegal, I have had to take many medications. That being said, I decided to take it easy and not go out Wednesday or Thursday night.

I find myself pretty much incapable of sleeping in. I typically wake up around eight, maybe nine the latest. This is rather ironic, because I don’t start class until eleven everyday and could sleep in until ten if I really wanted to. Anyway, on Friday (the first day of the weekend for me here) I woke up knowing that the rest of my friends would not be awake for at least a few hours. After eating my baguette and drinking my instant coffee, I decided I wanted to go for a walk. There is a very European/Western mall probably two kilometers away from my house, so I started to walk there. Unfortunately all of the boutiques at this mall are extraordinarily expensive, but there is a grocery store/supermarket, so I decided to peruse the aisles. One interesting thing about this store: all of the customers are European. This could be because the concept of an all-inclusive grocery store is a very Western thing, or maybe because it is more expensive (although the prices for many things are very in-line with the gas station). As I walked through the store, my instinct was to smile and say “Bonjour” to every person I passed. When I went to do so, however, I was not greeted back, nor did others even acknowledge me. Everyone just minded his or her own business, not making eye contact with anyone else. After living in a setting for the past two months where everyone always says hello to each other, there was something a little off-putting about this. I realized that I have unknowingly warmed up to the African sense of hospitality. Then, I further realized why people I pass walking down the street often seem so surprised by my acknowledgement of them: most toubabs do not give off a friendly air.

That evening I went to “English Conversation Club” hosted by the Youth English Society (YES). YES meets every Friday evening to have a group discussion in order for the members to practice English. They asked some American students/native English speakers to take part. This week’s topic was NGOs and development in Senegal. During this discussion, I learned that many young people/students in Senegal have a very pessimistic outlook on their future due to the extremely high unemployment rate. Many of them feel that their only hope is to find a way to get to the United States or Western Europe, where there are many more jobs. As an American college student, the thought of the future and my being able to get a job is often on my mind, but I still am confident that I will land a job with a decent salary. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be a college student knowing that there will be no work upon graduation. One of the women in the group said that she visited the United States and came back to Senegal, and if she has an opportunity to leave Senegal again she will never come back. “Brain drain” operates with full force in Senegal; the best and brightest, people whom Senegal really needs in their workforce, leave and do not come back.

Later on that night, I met up with some of my fellow students, and we decided to go to a bar where there would be Salsa dancing. I happen to love Salsa dancing, although I must admit that I am very much so out of practice and do not know exactly what I am doing. Unfortunately, not everyone else in my group appreciated Salsa dancing, so we went to a different club instead. This one was much more of a discotheque/club scene with solely hip hop music. Since clubs here are literally open until dawn, we didn’t leave the place until almost four in the morning.

A group of us arrived in Marmoz, our neighborhood in Dakar, around four in the morning to find an alimentation/food stand still open. As strange as it was to see this open, it was even stranger that the place had a line. In fact, I found it altogether pretty crazy just how many people were out and about at that hour of the night/morning. Having just come back from a club, we decided to get sandwiches. We ended up getting the same thing (what I like to call a “chocolate sandwich”): A giant roll of bread with a spread similar to nutella, except instead I think I was just entirely chocolate. The best part: the sandwiches cost just 250 CFA (50 cents). We sat on these cement “benches” that were really just road dividers turned over on their sides. As we sat beneath the night sky full of stars, we reflected on just how ridiculous our current situation was. I walked home with my comrades, went into my house, and noticed that my cell phone was nowhere to be found.

And thus, the cell phone episode began. I tried to remember the last place I had the phone: sitting on the benches eating the sandwiches. Conclusion: I must have dropped it or left it on the bench sometime between getting the sandwich and getting home. I told myself, “okay, the situation is not entirely grave, I have a range of where the phone must be.” The thought of paying for another phone along with the logistical nightmare of getting a new number was enough to make me cringe. However, it was currently 4:30 and still completely dark outside and I was all by myself, so going immediately back out to look for it was not really an option. I figured that the sun would be rising in about two hours, so if I could stay awake until then and then go out as soon as it started to get light outside, I may be able to find it. I couldn’t just wait until I woke up the next day because it would definitely be found and taken at that point. So, I forced myself to stay awake, and by six, I was so tired that I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer to leave. I put on my running shoes so I could make a quick getaway if needed/so I could pretend like I was just a toubab on her morning run (entirely untrue). As I started to walk out the front door, Soso, who was already awake, came running to see what was going on. I explained that I lost my cell phone and needed to find it right away. I expected her to reply with “you’re crazy, go back to bed, you’re not going to find it.” Instead, however, she looked at me and told me that I absolutely needed to go and find it, right at that moment. So I ventured off into the dark, hoping that the sun would rise any minute. I got back to the benches where we were eating the sandwiches less than two hours previously and started searching the ground, to no avail. I was starting to get really upset at this point, not to mention I was very, very tired. It was the morning hour when many people go to the mosque, which was right across the street, and I was getting some really strange looks. I decided to ask the man who sold me the sandwich if he had seen a cell phone lying around anywhere. He immediately recognized me as the girl who bought the chocolate sandwich two hours before. I attempted to explain what was going on in calm, composed French, but it just came out as, “J’AI PERDU MON PORTABLE ICI IL Y A DEUX HEURES!!!” He took my phone number called the phone over and over again as the two of us searched the ground for the phone. Another man who was in line for the food stand started to help us too. Suddenly, this [presumably] homeless man that had been sitting on the benches, kind of crazily just singing to himself, started reaching in this gap that was in the cement benches. One of the men helping me asked the homeless man if he had seen my phone.

“Is it black and red?”

“YES!”

“It’s in here.” He points to this small crevice in the cement bench.

For the next ten minutes, the three men try to get the phone out. When they couldn’t get it out by reaching in the gap, they tried to tip the bench, but it was too heavy, so they finally found a stick/tree branch that they fished it out with. The man had wrapped my phone many times in newspaper and stuffed it in there. The two men told me that I should thank the homeless man for putting my phone in a safe place, so I did thank him profusely, but I still wondered what thought process went into putting a cell phone there. I thanked the other men for helping me, and then I ran back home, arriving at my house just as the sun started to rise.

I went to sleep at seven in the morning, and when I woke up three and a half hours later (once again, unable to sufficiently sleep in), I really wondered if all that had been a dream. I checked my phone, and sure enough, I had a plethora of missed calls at about 6:15 in the morning from the man who helped me find the phone.

I cannot believe that those guys were so adamant about helping me, but I will be forever grateful to them for it.