A Typical Drive Home

(Continuation of A Typical Day at Work)
After about 20 minutes of maneuvering around the uneven ditches that are the dirt road, we noticed a wobbling feeling near the back of the car.  Continuing on a little more cautiously, we got to the next town and stopped to have a look.  Sure enough a tire change was in order.

            Luckily we only had to wait about 15 minutes, with the company of a few donkeys, clearly unhappy about our presence interrupting their sleeping in the middle of the road, for a sept-place to drive by.  We waved down the driver, who happened to live in the town in which we were stranded.  He gave us directions to his house and we gave him a wrench (I’m still trying to figure that transaction out), and he was off. 

We bulkily made our way down the narrow dirt roads of the town, which were only about two feet wider than the SUV, stopping every once in a while to ask for directions.  After backtracking a few times and certainly drawing the attention of everyone who was about, we were lead down the street by a neighbor of the sept-place driver.  He helped us open up the trunk of the car in his neighbor’s driveway, where we found, as apparently promised, a spare tire.  After a quick tire change, we wound our way through the maze of slender streets out onto the main road.

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This time, we were actually heading out for good.  The rest of the ride home, the only other slow down we encountered was negotiating the pot-hole ridden roads – and by negotiating I mean choosing between big pot-holes, really big pot-holes, and ditches; smooth road surface just wasn’t an option.  Thanks to my childhood of long car rides enhanced by relentless disturbances (a.k.a. a little brother) and my justifiable exhaustion, the swerving and bouncing of the SUV were no match for my willingness to sleep. 

Groggily forcing myself awake as we meandered down the road to my house, I checked my phone, only to discover that it was just past midnight. We pulled up to my pink house, dark and peaceful and full of sleeping people.  Feeling guilty for awaking her, I reluctantly called sama Yaay to come let me in.  After a few words of apology from Cheikh, the two of us stumbled sleepily inside, where she accepted, just as groggily as I offered, the fruit and juice that I had brought back. 

Then, suddenly awake, she looked at me, and clearly and sternly demanded, “Yow, Reer nga?” (Have you eaten dinner?)

“Déedéet.”

She briskly brought from the kitchen the leftovers from dinner, and quickly set me a plate of cerre u mafi, couscous with a delicious peanut butter and palm oil sauce, topped off with a big piece of meat.  Sitting in my room, sleepily savoring my delicious leftovers, I decided that, regardless of the setbacks and the fatigue, a stomach full of mafi and a nice, mosquito-net protected bed was a much more perfect ending to a very long day.

Besides providing me with a story to tell around future Thanksgiving tables, this experience also happens to be very telling of many of the problems here in Senegal.  Take the roads.  Even the roads in between main cities are littered with pot holes, less frequently than those in this story but they are still a problem.  This is an example of what I’ve concluded must be the result of a lack of infrastructure, or perhaps a lack of an efficient system within the existing infrastructure.

I would also like to highlight the fact that this whole adventure was not even technically necessary.  The selection of enterprises is a stage of the process that the community leaders can do independently; we were simply there to guide the process along.  Not only was it unnecessary for us to be there, but it only took about 20 minutes.  Actually the real reason we went was for M. Diouf to take measurements for another project, but the day before we had gone to Loul Séssène for the same process, and spent about two times as much time in the car as choosing between enterprises.

This leads to another thing I have noticed in my short time here, which is a lack of training.  We had to go to show the presidents of these communities how to go through the enterprise process, because they didn’t already know how to do it.  I’ve also noticed that, in filling out forms related to projects, the people filling them out often don’t know what information we’re asking for.  Only having been here for three weeks, I have only noticed this problem, and haven’t come up with any substantial causes or solutions.

Senegal is in a very interesting stage of development.  It has a functional government, a willing population, and various private and state programs working towards social, technological, and economical advancement.  However, it is stuck in this mélange of old and new.  While waiting for a herd of cattle to cross the road, you can jump out of the car to go by credits for your cell phone, and drop some change into the hand of a polio-handicapped man with no way of obtaining medical help.  In Dakar, 50 year old car rapids share the road with charrettes and 2010 Mercedes Benzes.  Giant skeletons of buildings stand, unfinished, on the outskirts of the capital city of the region due to the abandonment – for political or capital reasons – of ambitious projects.

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It is these juxtapositions that strike me on a daily basis, that provoke questions that I can’t find answers to, that illustrate perfectly the state of the country – pushing itself forward and into the world economy since before independence, but struggling with the hindrances of governmental misjudgments and capital inadequacies (due largely, but not uniquely, to the after-effects of colonialism, which are quite numerous - perhaps I will delve into this subject later on), searching for a balance between modern and traditional.  But then again, what do I know, Amuma dara!