Changing Gears

It’s been nice to see familiar faces and places in Dakar. After work on Friday, I went for a run on the beach up to the fish market, dodging flying soccer balls, fish heads scattered on the sand, and running by horse-drawn carriages and past little kids yelling, “Toubab! Toubab!” I was surprised to see so many soccer games underway so late in the day since it’s Ramadan and most of Dakar’s population is fasting daily until sundown.

I had dinner with a few friends later that night at a Thai restaurant that was really quite good. They served a decent pad thai, spring rolls, and satay with an excellent peanut sauce. There were bits of tofu in the pad thai, too, which was a treat since it’s hard to find here.

After dinner we went to Just 4 U, a well-known club in Dakar that had been closed for the last few months that I was here previously. There are live bands every night of the week on the outdoor stage and although we stayed only for the warm-up band (who played until 1 am), the music was fantastic and it was a beautiful night to sit outside. I thought the lead singer could be bound for Broadway, the way he sang and the way he carried himself.

I’ve been hit harder by jet lag this round than another other trip I can recall, and have been exhausted this weekend because I’ve been up for hours at a time during the middle of the night all week. On nights when the power was out, I’d go to bed at 9:30 and sleep a few hours, only to find myself wide awake at 1:30 am and unable to fall back asleep until 4 am. Finally, after giving into sleeping as much as my body decided it needed to this weekend, I’m feeling better, although still lethargic. I went to bed around 2 am on Friday night and dragged myself out of bed at 1 pm on Saturday afternoon!

I went to an orphanage yesterday afternoon with a couple of girls who work in the Dakar office and who live next door to the apartment where I’m staying here. The orphanage, run by Catholic nuns, is in town and cares for 86 children who are orphans. I spent two hours playing with 1- to 2-year-old children in a large, bright, open room filled with about 20 children and another 7 or 8 volunteers (most of whom were young Senegalese women, as part of their internship to become health workers).

The head sister greeted us upon arrival and thanked us for coming and suggested that we divide ourselves between the newborns, who needed to be held and rocked, and the young children. The minute I stepped into the playroom, 3 children crawled over to me and one climbed into my lap. All of them smiled back when I exchanged toys with them or tickled their bellies, even just looked at them with a big grin. There were dozens of toys available for the children, and some of the toys looked new. A few children seemed nearly ready to start walking, so I walked around the room with them, supporting them as they stumbled along, learning to alternate one leg and then the other, slowly gaining strength to continue. Others seemed desperate for attention – one boy barely detached himself from my leg as I walked around with another child, and he’d climb right into my lap if I sat down.

I was exhausted and dehydrated by 5pm, when the children returned to their cribs and had diapers changed and it was time for them to be fed, but so impressed by the facility’s cleanliness and organization. It’s heart-wrenching to see such bright, loving children without permanent homes, though encouraging to see that they are living in a place where the staff seem very kind, caring, and devoted to the children’s well-being.

West Africa has elements of what people thing of as classically exotic Africa, or what usually makes headlines outside of this poor region, but there are other parts that stand out for me. Nutrition research here is different and I constantly question my assumptions of what we define as feasible. Nutrition and health services are vastly different from those that I am familiar with in the United States. After working in a neonatal ICU with state-of-the-art technology and highly specialized care, I feel dumbstruck by the differences in clinical services available in some of the places I’ve visited because the need for basic health care is so great and I’m constantly amazed by the resourcefulness of some communities in working tirelessly to make such services available.

Dakar, the capital of West Africa, is a big city and I’ve found that it’s easy to feel lost in a large place. However, in a city of 3 million people, there are always new parts of the city to discover, and new people to meet. Sometimes it was hard to live in such a transient city. I made several acquaintances whose company I often really enjoyed; but they were transferred to a different work posting in another town or another country before long, or perhaps were already occupied with family obligations and/or their own lives locally. In general, I don’t like being skeptical of people, but I often felt cautious of people I met randomly in shops or on the beach, reluctant to end up a naïve American who was taken advantage of after hearing stories of bad experiences. But overall, the challenges posed here are interesting and I’m grateful for the experiences here and for the friendships I’ve formed. My French teacher called today, unexpectedly; she was in the neighborhood and so she popped by for a brief visit. It was really fun to reconnect.

I started this blog because coming to Africa was a dream come true and, to me, life here is fascinating. I enjoy writing; the process of reflecting upon a story, refining it, and sharing with others, learning more about my experiences in the process (although it’s taken me a while to upload all the retrospective blog entries that were sitting on my hard drive as Microsoft Word documents for the past few months). I wanted to chronicle for my family and friends my encounters with people here, the things that sparked my curiosity, and those that were different from – or surprisingly similar to - life at home.

I leave for Burkina tomorrow and look forward to the next phase of living in Africa. It’s hard to believe that almost exactly a year ago I landed here for the first time. Although Dakar is a more familiar place now, there’s still so much to be discovered here and in other parts of the continent. I’ve visited places that I’d only imagined seeing, and have met people who surprised me with the most generous hospitality, and still feel like I've just scratched the surface. The lure of Africa – and my curiosity about it – remains.