Goodbye Tears and Some Long-Overdue Reflection

As I sit safely ensconced at home in Accra, it’s quite surreal that my four months in Dakar came to an end so quickly while I was going to the beach, sitting through seemingly endless lectures, and side-stepping the steaming piles the horses leave so frequently in their wake to the disgust of unsuspecting pedestrians like myself on my way to work and school. The nostalgia has already began to form around my memories of Dakar as I pick out certain moments and turn them over carefully and lovingly in my hands with every opportunity I get. I’m sure that since returning home, every other conversation I’ve had with family and friends has contained the phrases  “Oh my gosh, so in Dakar there was this…/I met this…/I saw this…we used to do this” or various other exclamations along those lines.

And yet, the eternal struggle remains of writing to describe a place or a situation to every last detail and with an accuracy that would give others a chance to see a snapshot of what you saw. There is also the anxiety following the question “How was it? Tell me everything!” Is it possible to neatly summarize Dakar into a few sentences before the listener’s (or reader’s) eyes begin to glaze over? How could I possibly convey the sights, sounds and smells that were in a lot of ways so comfortingly familiar and yet strikingly different at the same time?  There are so many things I’m going to miss about Dakar, things I didn’t even realize had grown important to me over my time there. Don’t get me wrong, there were definitely some aspects that were unpleasant to say the least, but there were still so many aspects I would not have exchanged for all the bissap (hibiscus flower) juice in Senegal.

The danger of building a life and a routine anywhere for an extended period of time is that you begin to take a lot of things for granted the more they become commonplace elements of your daily activities. And yet, little did I know that something as simple as the enthusiastic exchange of greetings every time you run into someone you know, or even people in boutiques, restaurants and insert-name-of-public-place-here. I’m going to miss the rapid-fire chorus of “Ça va, nanga def? Ça va, lu bees? Ça va bien? Bien merci!” I thought greetings were important in Ghana until I went to Senegal and realized that a simple “Good morning” does not a proper greeting make. What made watching and sharing in these greetings was the knowledge that they weren’t just an empty habit done for the sake of doing it. For the most part, people seemed genuinely interested in your well-being and that of your family, and conversations could be stretched for an extra ten minutes at the least as they inquired after these.

It is difficult to write from a hindsight perspective without romanticizing every aspect of the experience, the beauty of the beaches, the kindness of strangers, the belly-aching laughs shared with friends, the crazy taxi rides, the list goes on. There were definitely difficulties and obstacles encountered in my everyday life in Dakar. Being mistaken for a “Dakaroise” or “Sénégalaise” definitely had its perks, lower taxi fares and fewer questionable characters trying to take advantage of my greenness to name a few. However, this “ability” to blend in also had its pitfalls. I had countless awkward conversations on account of the fact that I understood far less Wolof than I initially appeared to. I can’t forget to mention the fact that I was given far less leeway to skirt around social norms because as an African I was expected to “know better”.  Close to the end of the program, an acquaintance I had made at the law school that was housed in the same building as CIEE confronted me with my initial unfriendliness. He thought that seeing as I was from Ghana, I knew the importance of greeting people one walked past, and thought that I was “brought up better than that.” He wanted to know why I did not acknowledge him and other students when I walked past them on the stairs or run into them on the terrace, and didn’t want to accept my excuse of being shy or taking a while to feel comfortable in a new place. Incidents like these paled in comparison to all the positive moments. I don’t think I’m going to forget the week were I smiled and nodded my way through our rural visit while trying to evade marriage proposals, or all the weekend getaways organized by the program where we bonded, and swam and talked and ate amazing food!

For someone who has grown used to always being in between places, saying goodbye to friends from home and family, only to talk for hours over shaky Skype connections with roommates and friends from school had become a normal part of my life. Contrary to my previous arrogance and over-estimation of my capacity to adapt characteristic of “third culture kids” the world over, I was shocked to find how quickly and sadly my last week in Dakar flew by. From Monday to Wednesday, I spent my time feverishly trying to finish final essays and prepare for presentations. The French system of education has a lovely way of preserving the bulk of your schoolwork until the end of the semester when you are just about out of steam. On Wednesday morning, we had a re-entry session that consisted of all the students in the program and staff sharing our impressions and lessons learned from the semester. I think that was the first time I had been prompted to think about my stay in Dakar and the ways it had impacted me and changed my perception of the world around me. I confronted my fear that as my travels continue, I would become a strange hybrid who isn’t able to call one specific geographical location home or call one identity “myself” after having constructed temporary home-like spaces in so many different places and put on the corresponding identity to match. Above all, it was just a time for us to reflect on the four months behind us and to think about how we were going to adjust back into what we had previously known as our “real” lives.

Wednesday brought another onslaught of emotions as we celebrated the end of the semester at a farewell dinner held at the Club Olympique (a fancy sports facility none of us would have been able to afford) on the Corniche. The night passed in a flurry of picture-taking and hugs as the realization began to sink in that there were some people we might not see again, or at least for a very long time expect for the off chance that we crossed paths in an airport somewhere in between destinations. I walked home to Mermoz with three of my closest friends from the program, a fitting way to end such a night filled with nostalgia. The next three days were spent running to and fro in Dakar buying gifts and saying more goodbyes. Unfortunately, my host mum had to travel to Thies, a town just outside Dakar, for a funeral and as therefore could not be home for my last few days. She said she would try to return on Saturday morning at the very latest. Her sister Adèle came to stay so that I wouldn’t be home alone, and we stayed up late talking and laughing and swapping stories about the incredible Soso. I had a hard time containing myself when Adèle said, “You know, I was telling Soso the other day, this time they gave her daughter”, referring to me! I was beyond over the moon to know that my host mother and her family had grown to see me as a daughter. It was the first time this acceptance had been voiced explicitly and I went to bed ecstatic and a little teary.

Needless to say, a fair amount of tears were shed on my part as I got ready to leave. It was extremely difficult to come to terms with leaving when I felt like I had only begun to truly settle in and began to feel comfortable in the city. I tried not to harbor regrets, but I wish I had gone to Marché HLM more often, if not to buy, but just to admire the fabrics and clothes on display. I would have loved to be more of a tourist, sight-seeing and taking advantage of the public buses to explore different neighborhoods. It would also have been great for Lac Rose to actually be rose when we visited, but I wouldn’t trade the relaxed day spent with friends that came out of our adventure. (Moral of the story: don’t visit Lac Rose on a cloudy day because the water will NOT be pink J). I hope this won’t be the last time I set foot in Dakar, at least if I heed Adèle’s warnings not to be “like the others” and to come back and visit! So until then, Sénégal, à la prochaine, ba beneen yoon!