Lessons Learned from Dakarois Public Transportation

Whew! Another long break since my last post. To give you a brief update of what I’ve been up to since my last blog post… Last weekend saw all 54 of us at Toubab Dialow, an artists-colony-turned-resort-town. If I ever figure out how to post pictures on this blog, I have a couple of beautiful ones. But my favorite moment of the trip – watching waves crash 20 feet below me in the moonlight – couldn’t be captured in a photograph. Since then, my classes have really started cooking and it’s about all I’ve been equal to to keep up with them, especially having less-than-reliable electricity in the evenings.

My days have started falling into a comfortable pattern, which is excellent. I wake up, navigate getting ready and eating breakfast, and take public transportation to school.

It’s this last part of my morning routine that I’d like to devote the majority of this post to. I live in Ouakam, a neighborhood of Dakar which is so big that it’s often considered a separate city. My house is about five miles away from the CIEE Study Center. It’s a hell of a walk, but only a 15 minute (and $0.20 – transportation in Dakar is one of the cheapest things you can buy) bus ride. At first I dreaded this bus ride. Every day it seemed like something new went wrong – my typical bus didn’t come and I didn’t know what other lines I could take, I couldn’t get correct change back from the ticket booth, the buses were way overcrowded, I couldn’t make myself understood to ask when the bus was leaving or to tell the driver that my stop was coming up – the list goes on and on.

But now I’ve grown to really enjoy my morning commute (the evening commute is always harder. It’s rush hour, there are less buses, and people are just crankier by the time it hits 6 pm). It’s primarily my experiences in taxis, buses and car rapides – Google image this term, I dare you – that has made me realize that Dakar is the safest city I’ve ever been in.

Case One: About two weeks ago I was on a half empty bus that was getting ready to leave. A middle aged, well-off looking woman stepped onto the bus, pulled her bus fare out of a wallet in her purse, and then placed her wallet and purse on a seat to save it as she walked to the front of the bus to pay the driver. When she came back to her seat, not a soul had touched purse or wallet.

Case Two: A young teenage girl was sitting in a seat of a crowded bus. An adult woman carrying a large, cumbersome purse stepped onto the bus. At first, the woman tried to hold onto the handrail while keeping a firm grasp on her purse, but soon realized that she wouldn’t be able to do both. So, she dropped the purse into the girl’s lap, telling her, “Hold this for me.” When she got off the bus she collected her purse, thanked the girl, and asked her her name.

Case Three: A young mother struggled to hop onto a too-full car rapide with an infant strapped to her back and two young children in tow. The driver lurched off before the mother had a chance to find a seat and almost sent her flying. Two passengers grabbed a child each and settled them in their laps, leaving the woman free to catch her balance and find a seat for herself and her infant. The smaller of the two children sitting on strangers’ laps put his finger in his mouth and went to sleep. When the mother got off the car rapide, she thanked the two strangers and asked them their names.

Case Four: I was dickering with a cab man at 3:30 in the morning, trying to get his price down to 1,500 cfa (about 3 dollars) to take me home. I finally managed to get the price, but it had taken me longer than normal. At the tail end of the conversation, a young Senegalese man came up to me to make sure that I wasn’t getting cheated on the price. After confirming that the price I’d gotten was fair, I got in the taxi and set off.

This was the first time that I had been in a taxi by myself in Dakar, and the first time that I’d been out late at night, so I was pretty stressed out. As soon as the taxi turned off the main, paved road and onto a tiny dirt track, I got even more stressed. After a good five minutes of panicking, we did eventually turn onto a paved road, and I saw the Lighthouse, which is a good landmark and within walking distance of my house. No sooner had I started to relax, then the taxi driver stopped in the middle of a dark, creepy intersection, and asked me, “A gauche ou tout droit?” (Left here or straight here?), a question that I didn’t know the answer to. “Oh, god,” I thought to myself. “I’m stuck in a cab with a driver that doesn’t know how to get to my neighborhood, and I’m a 30 minute walk across open country from home.”
Seeing my worry, the cab driver immediately started driving again. “Don’t worry,” he said, clearly trying to be soothing. “I was only asking because there’s a front entrance and a back entrance to your neighborhood, and I wanted to know if your house was closer to the back entrance. But if you don’t know, I’ll take you to the front entrance and you can direct me from there.” Three minutes later, I knew exactly where I was, and was in comfortable sprinting distance from three of my friends’ houses. I directed the cab driver to my house, paid him, thanked him, and collected my change, and was told in a paternalistic tone that the driver would wait outside to make sure that I got into my house okay, since it’s dangerous to be out alone late at night.

To put it simply, as crowded, hot, and stressful as public transportation is in this city, I’ve seen more real evidence of a community atmosphere after one month here than I have in all of my 20 years living in a small, sleepy suburban “community.” Even as an obvious outsider, I’ve been shown more real concern and consideration than I’ve ever experienced in America.


Tags: , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *