point Z

So much has happened in the last five days, and I can’t figure out where to begin this one, so for a momentary lack of creativity (and a bit of exhaustion) I guess I’ll go at this chronologically. I went to Dakar this weekend, needing to connect with a handful of people and a city I won’t see for a couple months. I went to a market I’d never been to before, but was as charmingly hot, dusty, and noisy as ever. A real If You Can’t Find It, You Don’t Need It kind of place. The vendors sell mostly used and some new clothing - heaps of it that are shipped from the West. It’s quite unlike most other Dakar markets, which are typically nebulous, for lack of a better word. Just stall after stall after stall and sometimes not even stalls along really labyrinthine paths that lead you to no where except into other pockets of small-time commerce, clustered around no real center at all. (Prokaryotic-like actually does it some justice, if you don’t mind getting biological about it; and by prokaryotic I mean, as you can imagine, all the cell junk sans nucleus). It never fails to strike me as something miraculous, that when I finally reach the outskirts of it all, there’s always a taxi driver who know where in God’s name we are. But the market I was at this weekend was, to my surprise and slight dismay, linear. Bought jeans with some blingin sparklies on the behind to wear clubbing! Intermittently through the next 24 hours I went to a quiet beach and an outrageously expensive Thai restaurant, danced till 4 in the am at a jivey bumping club, got hassled by greedy, underpaid cops for not having “papers,” (for the record, I had mine!), met some gentlemanly gars riding tandem on a moto who kindly bought us a bottle of water and paid half the bribe money, had the most deliciously hearty breakfast, the kind I’m still thinking about, and made it home to Thiès not only in one piece, but with a full belly and fond memories. Traveled back via sept-place, which is an ingeniously efficient form of carpooling amounting to something like a station-wagon carrying seven people plus driver quite uncomfortably but for very little cost, and if lucky, comes with a cute Moroccan man who will sing suras all the way. Made it home to find our quaint little jungle bungalow had been landscaped to smithereens (people have no respect for shade) and my room ankle-deep in water (reservoir issues).

And that was only the beginning of the journey! Yesterday I sadly left some amazing girls in Thiès and commenced my biggest adventure yet, which will have me working in the Ziguinchor region for the next two months. I’ve been traveling with the NGO’s computer technician and some other people I still find quite lovely despite being squished in a mini but air-conditioned pick-up with them for the greater part of the last 2 days. We spent the night at the regional office in Kaolack, having tea and chatting under an immense and quiet sky. Took our time getting on the road this morning, a road full of potholes (where it was paved) - so full of potholes in fact, the speed bumps seemed redundant - but nonetheless, a road which would carry us through The Gambia (a rough looking place) and ultimately to point Z - Ziguinchor.

So here I am in my new digs, which I’m quickly falling in love with, as I feared. The name Ziguinchor (which Europeans pronounce Zee-guin-shore, and locals something more like Zigi-chor) is derived from Portuguese, meaning "to sit and cry"; many captives were taken from this area during the age of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When you ask people what’s Ziguinchor like? People invariably tell you: “green.” And green it is! So green you’d imagine the grass would glow in the dark. Such a contrast from the dustier north I came from, whose landscape is persistently turning to shades of gray. The town reminds me of a rusty Key West (maybe because of the uncomfortably long-and-slow getting here, maybe the mangroves). It is situated on a river, and the smell of salt and fish gives away the economy. Unlike the rest of Senegal, the dominant ethnic group and language is not Wolof, but instead Djola and Mandinka. In reality, the people here speak at least 3 different languages fluently. Djola society is traditionally unhierarchical, and while I’m still learning what exactly that means in terms of social structures, one principle thing it implies is they’ve been somewhat resistant to foreign authority imposed in their homeland in the past. (Fortunately, conflicts are almost unheard of today).

The people at the regional office gave me a warm welcome, an invitation to live at so-and-so’s house, and a watermelon. So that brings me to the present tense! What’s a girl to do in a new African city, but test the water? Literally, to make sure it doesn’t give her dysentery or something similarly awful in the middle of the night. If you’re wondering, it’s got a funny taste which could be either chlorine or something more insidious, but as of now I’m feeling good. Really good.