“You Americans and your toilet paper!”

This from one of my new professors, after the third program student in a row gave the same answer to the question “what do you miss most from home?”
So far, this experience has definitively succeeded in demonstrating to me that I am a spoiled brat. Here I am, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Dakar, bewailing the fact that, in my room, I have only one electrical outlet and thus am faced with the dire choice between charging my computer, charging my phone, and the critically necessary though often woefully inadequate fan. I walk to campus in the morning and think: yes! Toilet paper, air conditioning, and internet – I have the school day in luxury. Toilet paper, air conditioning, and internet. These aren’t even things that I previously didn’t consider luxurious; these are things that I previously didn’t consider at all. I actually don’t think it had ever occurred to me, in the nearly twenty years of my life before I decided to come here, that these are things one might hypothetically not have.

Let me explain: it’s hot in Dakar. I think I can count on one hand the number of occasions during the first week outside of the university campus when, if asked, I would have described my temperature status as “only somewhat too hot” or below. The days have averaged in the lower nineties, with a blistering sun and crushing humidity that has now several times burst over into what I would describe as torrential downpours and my host guy-who-I’m-not-sure-who-he-is dubbed light rain. Aside from the strength of the rain, it’s not much different from this summer’s June and July in DC, when I was around interning. I knew that, and took it as a preparatory challenge: by the end of my tenure on the Hill, I would have attained a state of inner peace about heat and humidity. I ended up being quite pleased with how well I managed this, frost-crusted northern girl that I am. There’s just one problem, which I’ve recently managed to discover: there’s a big difference between inner peace about walking in the intense heat for two and a half blocks from the heavily air-conditioned metro station to my heavily air-conditioned workplace and inner peace about being in intense heat with no respite of any kind in the easily foreseeable future. Up on the roof one night, beautiful not only for its view but for its breeze, Aziz admonished me for not wearing a sweater. “Non, merci, c’est bon,” I said, figuring that was more diplomatic than “actually, this is one of those rare occasions when I’m only somewhat too hot.” The food at breakfast and dinner is hot, both in terms of spiciness and temperature, and every now and then my recoil from that overcomes even my noticeable hunger and my entire host family’s constant encouragement to eat more.
And here’s the thing. Sometimes, when I get discouraged at the sharp cutout of the internet even in the few corners where I can get it, the constant danger of dropping my personal roll of toilet paper on the always-wet bathroom floor, the fact that, stepping out of the cool shower (that’s not temperature-regulated either, but I can’t say I mind) and not ever drying fully because I immediately start to sweat again – I tell myself it’s only four months. It’s not forever. Come December, I’ll turn my thermostat down to sixty and wrap myself in blankets at night, I’ll buy myself a fresh salad, I’ll have a fully-stocked bathroom, a washing machine and a power strip, I’ll walk to a coffee shop and relax on wireless with a soy chai.
Goodness, I’m a spoiled brat. Because, the thing is that, for all of the people I pass every day and the people with whom I live, it’s not four months. It’s forever. And to get myself to a state resembling contentment with their life, I occasionally have to remind myself that I’m not really like them, that I just happened, through no merit of my own, to be born in a place where I could form the kind of implicit demands I now make on my world, and that I’ll eventually go back to a world that conforms to those demands. And it’s not even like I’m actually living in their world. I’ve managed to bring quite a lot of mine with me. Here I am, on my Macbook Pro, drugged on doxycycline and multivitamins, drinking my own special filtered water, drenching myself in my own imported shampoo and conditioner and soap and sunscreen, supplementing the food they give me with fruits and vegetables and yogurt that might well be too expensive for them to buy, stashing my own personal syringes under my bed in case I need a shot and can’t trust possibly reused needles at the nearest hospital, carrying around a king’s ransom of paper in my notebooks. And I’m complaining, if only to myself and to the world wide web?
So, that’s the bad news. Forget the excessive-do-gooder save-the-world type who wants to jet off to Africa: I’m apparently not a very good person, or at least not a person who’s so far managed to accumulate much in the way of perspective.
I always like to go for the bad news first. The good news is that this weekend, what I would call my first real weekend here that’s not orientation or moving in with the family, has been awesome. The blow-by-blow would be, I think, slightly excessive, so I’ll stick to a few highlights: I got caught walking into Mermoz in rain so intense that I had to pull a Gene Kelly, twirling my soaking hair in the gush of a drain pipe a la Singing in the Rain. I found another CIEE student willing to go running with me in this ridiculous weather, and we discovered that a good enough view is sufficient to distract us even from temperatures that feel halfway to the fiery abyss. (Why did we decide midday would be an excellent time to exercise outside? I wish I had asked myself that question several days ago.) The ocean is so blue and turquoise and needled with perfect froth that it looks unreal, one of those clips that, if it was in a painting, you’d take as a sign of poor artistry or at least inadequate realism. Climbing the cliff past the huge white mosque, we could see downtown Dakar on the coastline, very metropolitan at that distance and laced in hovering dust.
Later that day, my yaay and Sokhna took another of my U.S. companions and me to the Marché HLM to find clothes for Korité, the holiday at the end of Ramadan. This was shopping – if you’ll pardon the expression – on crack. The outdoor market turned at times into a press of people so colorful and thick that it was all I could do to stay by the back of yaay’s flowered headscarf while glancing down with enough regularity to make sure I didn’t plunge my foot into a mud puddle. Shoppers engaged in battles-by-elbow with wandering vendors aggressively trying to press their wares into our hands, everything from jewelry to toothpaste to henna designs to baby clothes. This seemed to be happening to each brave shopper in the crush, but, upon casual observation, I would give the increase in attention given to Amy Lou and I a factor of about seven. We got everything from French declarations of our beauty to “tubaab, regarde!” (The word “tubaab” translates from Wolof alternately as “foreigner” or “white person” and is one of the most regular sounds I hear these days.) And if we thought walking was intense – we discovered very quickly the need for a neon sign reading “non, merci, ba beneen,” on each of our foreheads the moment we stayed still as yaay stopped for long enough to haggle for a pair of underwear at a flat display stand, walked away when she didn’t get her price, and then caused us to be nearly jostled over by the vendor as he followed her to agree to take what she asked. We both got traditional Senegalese outfits, from a stall so narrow that fitting the two of us in along with yaay and Sokhna and the chair the vendor had pulled out for yaay impeded movement significantly. Stay tuned for pictures after Korité.
I also got a glimpse of a more tourist-oriented part of the area: Gorée Island.


The entire program took a field trip on the short ferry out of the Dakar port to see the place where innumerable slaves made their last pause in Africa before being shipped to the Americas. It’s a strikingly European place drenched in tropical flora and West African accents, and it’s with a hint of guilt that I’ll admit I loved it: the women passing through narrow, flower-draped streets with wide bowls on their heads, the surf crashing against the high cliffs and pastel-colored buildings, the history museum tucked into the alcoves of a dusty military fort, the African-style paintings lining the walkways as vendors call you over to see. It’s easy to see the footsteps of the signares, a twisted Portuguese word referring to the women who came to own most of the island and many of the domestic and export slaves there, daughters of the rule that any slave woman who became pregnant by a European was set free. And then, of course, less lovable: la Maison des Esclaves. This is another exercise in perspective. Walking through in the dusty silence in a crush of French and African tourists, I slipped myself into a dim, jagged corner, took a breath, and tried to imagine what it was like. I tried to feel the chains against my skin, crushed by the neck against a line of other, near-naked captives. I tried to feel the cramps in my body, allowed to move once per day to use the restroom (a term, I’m guessing, that’s even more loosely applied in this case than in that of my current house). I tried to picture what the door spilling light into the corridor would look like, knowing that the jewel tone water was draped over sharks, hovering close for the regular epidemic prevention practice of throwing slaves who fell ill to the sea, knowing that even if I managed to stay healthy enough in the foul air to get out of these walls alive it would be through that door, pushed over a few steps of rock and onto a ship bound for whatever colony the buyers on the balcony saw fit without regard for the destinations of my family members, truly and horrifyingly alone in the claustrophobic underbelly of the Atlantic.

Does it surprise you that I don’t have quite enough perspective to really imagine that, either? At the end of several minutes of concentrated effort, I was still mostly a twenty-first century tubaab, clothed and fed and free, and inadequately appreciative of all of that. I can be a bit too ambitious sometimes, I think.
But at least, when it presents itself for free and in an opportune location, I’m starting to appreciate toilet paper.