218 Ker Jahkarlo
No sign marks the entrance to my hostel. There is absolutely nothing to betray the existence of a place for visitors. The street has no markings and I’m still unclear if “Ker Jahkarlo” is the name of an avenue or merely the name of the building. To get in you must ring the bell (which, thankfully, works well). The inhabitants, if they like your look, can then admit you to a small courtyard at the front of the establishment. There is still one obstacle to admittance, a solid, well-lacquered brown door protecting the house proper.
Inside is uncharacteristically (for Dakar) well appointed with shiny tile floors and milk-colored walls. Some cheap touristy folk art adorns each room. The place doesn’t seem large at first but you soon realize it has three floors, a relative skyscraper for this neighborhood. My room, on the second floor, has two freestanding beds and one set of bunk beds but right now there are just two residents, a mid-30’s attractive French woman and myself. {Madame departed after my first day in Dakar, leaving the room solely in my possession.} One window faces south and generally picks up any breeze coming from the nearby ocean. Bright red curtains are dense enough to allow me to dress and undress without being observed by the home across the narrow alley. This entire street is an anomaly, with no trash on the street, and the homes multi-story mansions compared to the rest of the area. If you were dropped down from heaven into this street you would never guess you were in Dakar.
The street runs east-west. Go west and you soon encounter the Atlantic Ocean about three blocks from the hostel. Go east about 200 yards and you begin to see the typical Dakar avenue lined with countless stores and sidewalk vendors. The one unique feature of the neighborhood is Ecole Dior, a campus of several stucco-like buildings that houses some sort of school. But everything else in all directions bespeaks commerce. About a dozen blue and yellow busses line the various streets near the school. They are used for short journeys. I gather they are all privately owned with little or no regulation except for what custom dictates. Each has four or five windows on each side but somewhere it was determined that there should be no glass in any side window.
A quarter mile to the north is the bus ‘terminus’. Here you find a couple dozen uniformly white busses, the mode of travel for distances of about ten to twenty kilometers. They have sliding glass windows. Near the rear door of each bus in a metal cage in which sits the man who collects the fees of forty or fifty cents, typically. When the bus is crowded (as it generally is) money is passed from passenger to passenger until it reaches the man in the cage. Your destination is also relayed and, in due time, a receipt passes back to you. Checking these receipts is apparently a random government function so that once in a while an officious, unsmiling fellow boards to ask a few passengers to show said receipt. I don’t know what happens if you don’t have one.
A trip on one of these white busses reveals the life of the city. The most common businesses are lady’s hair dressers (coiffure); clothing shops (couture); bakeries (patisseries); fruit stands (bananas, mangoes, apples); furniture stores (large, upholstered chairs are the rage); automobile related businesses including gas stations, repair shops, auto graveyards, and the like (despite Dakar’s poverty the roads are jam packed with vehicles, mostly taxis but including some premium vehicles from Mercedes and various Asian companies); restaurants (though I never saw a restaurant that was bigger than three tables and many half that size); Western Union offices (wiring money in? or out?); shops selling thread; shops selling pots and pans; carpentry and metalworking places; and assorted vendors selling anything that might have some kind of demand. Graffiti covers many exposed walls, most of it apparently political but I saw one reading “Oxy Mort”, which I took to be an anti-drug sentiment.
Driving is the same anarchic war that you find in any loosely governed territory whether it is Manhattan or rural Laos. Taxis rule the road by intimidation except where the greater bulk of the busses create a kind of standoff. Like most similar places there is a plentitude of cracked windshields (someone should tell the Safelite people about the opportunities in foreign lands). By my count about one quarter of all four-wheeled vehicles have at least one crack. The taxis are all yellow and black and most are the workhorse Toyota’s seen around the world. Does the government require the paint job? I can only assume so, yet this seems odd in a land where one never sees a policeman or any functionary of the government from morning till night.
Government, in fact, seems entirely distant from the lives of Dakarians. I never saw a police station, or a cop guiding traffic (except for one intersection Downtown), or a post office (though there were a few Downtown), or workers collecting garbage (where does refuse go?), or men repaving the rutted streets. Electricity is a sometime thing, on and off at random times. Sewage was directed via channels beneath the street to the nearest beach where it often failed to reach the water and, instead, seeped into the sand. The smell of raw sewage was the most common odor of any part of Dakar except for the stench from the blue-black fumes of busses and trucks. Water came from our tap in the hostel but I’m not sure if that was a common thing. I never saw anyone toting pails of water so I figure this service was reliably provided—significant in such a dry land.
{Note: On my last walk around town I saw:
1. A garbage truck collecting refuse. Local women had brought their home trash in whatever bags were handy. But this truck is too little too late. Everywhere I see people sweeping the streets but still trash is everywhere, on every street.
2. Two trucks repaving a street. I even got to see the undersoil, a layer of reddish-brown clay. }
More than anything I got worn down the unending, unquiet mass of humanity that filled every available square foot of space. The population is overwhelmingly young. I saw only a handful of truly elderly folk. Is the life expectancy so meager that they all perish before they get to their fifties or sixties?
Young men are evident everywhere and their most common occupation is soccer. There are games in every vacant lot and along most beaches. The ocean forms the west boundary of the game and the surf helpfully returns any out of bounds balls. Even the remote beach areas, where the land is trodden flat, make good regulation soccer fields. I did see a couple guys wrestling on the beach and my impression is that boxing and wrestling are the next most popular sports. I also saw some guys with basketballs and passed one concrete area with several proper-looking hoops. But ninety percent of the sporting activity I saw was soccer. And it can’t be said that these young men are lazy. I saw many putting themselves through taxing drills: squat thrusts; sprints up sand dunes; sprint 20 yards and touch the ground, then same in reverse; or simply jogging along the streets or beach. One assumes this is all part of their strategy for competing for prominence in the Senegalese soccer world. And just about all of it is self-discipline. I saw only one man with a whistle who might have been some kind of coach.
Why did I not venture to the Senegalese hinterland? I don’t have any good reasons. Laziness; fear of malaria; fear of the unknown (even though I’ve been in similarly remote areas elsewhere); and desire to read and write. I also lost two days because of the demonstrations Downtown earlier this week. The heat is, of course, enervating but could have been overcome. I just didn’t want to bother. My whole venture here reminds me of many British movies of the mid-twentieth century where the idle English nobility (or just wealthy bourgeois) sat around on verandas or in restaurants of various exotic lands doing….nothing. On almost every trip I’ve ever made in my life there has been this tension between the part of me that craves experience and the other part, which is fundamentally a lazy slob.
No comments:
Post a Comment