Thursdays at The Café

I get the biggest kick out of kids aged a year and change. It's a fun age, watching them learning to interact with each other and starting to babble. Moms seem highly amused when their children are comfortable being carried around by a foreigner. It's a nice break from project data entry and verifying questionnaire forms when a I spot a little one who needs to be carried around or entertained.

The neighborhood surrounding the clinic brims with energy: rainbow-colored car rapides dodge potholes as they putt-putt down the street, taxis honk as they sneak up behind pedestrians walking in the street and barely avoid running them over, barefoot children run after each other shrieking, neighbors exchange ritual salutations, Nescafe coffee carts wheel around corners, goats rummage through heaps of trash, men pray on mats, women sit on inverted buckets on the sidewalk washing clothes, preparing the daily meal in large metal bowls over fires, or selling oranges, grapefruits, and candied roasted peanuts in small clear plastic sachets.

There are blocks and blocks of workshops where furniture is constructed, clothes are sewn, metal housewares formed. If I could capture the mosaic of sounds heard outside the clinic, of the clanking metal, whirring sewing machines, and instructions shouted in Wolof, I’d submit it to NPR for one of the guessing games of “name this sound.”

On Thursdays, in addition to feeding the children cereal, we collect blood samples of participants finishing the study in the morning (in order to analyze the plasma zinc concentrations of subjects) and lead an afternoon-long orientation with newly recruited study participants at the clinic. These are easily 12-hour days, from the time the taxi picks me up at 7 am, or quarter of, and I return home, following stops at the university to drop off the cooler and to store the samples and ice packs in the freezer.

After the participants have left the site each day, we have a brief team meeting, clean the room and prepare folders for the following day. Normally we munch on bread topped with canned tuna and sliced cucumbers, brought from home, for lunch at the clinic. Occasionally one of us will remember to bring mustard; then it feels like we’ve upgraded our meal plan.

However, we’ve instituted a weekly treat: our mid-day respite on the longer days is a café just a 10-minute walk from the clinic. The smell of freshly baked bread lingers in the air surrounding the building and inside there are rows and rows of treats at the patisserie counter. Napoleans, operas, éclairs, lemon tarts, apple tarts, croissants. Raisin bread, sesame rolls, whole wheat loaves. There are chocolate bars imported from France and boxes of loose leaf tea for sale. Recently on display are giant egg- and bunny-shaped chocolates on tables covered with yellow tablecloths.

We sit at one of the tables in the bright, airy room with sunshine streaming through windows, and flip through a Jeune Afrique magazine or newspaper after ordering lunch. Usually it's a hot panini sandwich with a green salad; sometimes I splurge for freshly pressed juice, but I always splurge for a perfectly-made cappuccino.