We recently made a trip to Dakar to accomplish 3
things. 1) We needed to attain a piece
of paper called a Carte Consulaire for Lucas to play on our neighborhood soccer
team. 2)
We were going to go to a grocery store there as there are many more options
of items to buy in Dakar than Thies. 3) Bekah had a doctor’s appointment in
Dakar.
Now it doesn’t sound like that complicated of a list of
tasks to accomplish, and it shouldn’t be.
However, we quickly found out that it may be slightly more complicated
than we anticipated as ordinary tasks can regularly become here. Lucas’ soccer coach for the neighborhood team
wasn’t even exactly sure what the piece of paper was that we needed to attain
for his license to play. He was just
passing along information, but the coach said we needed it, so we were
off.
We got to Dakar and started asking around to several
different Americans as to where we needed to go to get this mystery piece of
paper. Unfortunately, we found very
quickly we weren’t sure we would be able to find it because we asked three
different men, who combined have lived in Africa for over 100 years, and none
of them had even heard of it. But we
decided to be optimistic and start our search anyways since that was one of the main reasons for our
trip.
So we headed to the police station where they just pointed
us to another station. So we got in a
different taxi and headed there. While
we were there, we were sent to six different offices and even the sixth office
sent us to another office, but obviously we didn’t see this cycle ending soon
or with us actually getting the correct piece of paper. At this point, we were at a bit of a time
crunch since Bekah had an appointment, and we still hadn’t made it to the store,
so we decided to give up.
Then we headed to the store in a taxi, but since we aren’t in Dakar too often,
we weren’t sure exactly where it was and decided to just have the driver drop
us off and walk. We ended up walking
more than we had bargained for, and about 25 minutes later ended up at the
store, which was closed. Why? Well the store doors were open and the guard
was there like normal, but he informed us it just wasn’t open today and would
be open tomorrow. That didn’t help us
much since we were leaving later that afternoon.
Then we headed to Bekah’s appointment which was the only
successful part of our day thus far and for that we were very grateful.
However, then we had to begin our trek home. We had to catch a taxi to a suburb of Dakar
where we then would catch a sept place home which is basically a 7 person
station wagon. We sat at the station for
about 40 minutes in the back of the car waiting for our car to fill up. Then we started our way home basically
through a town that would be like driving on Lake Shore Drive during rush
hour.
Unfortunately this was probably
one of the hottest parts of the day, and there was no wind whatsoever. So we were just inching along, hoping to catch
a tiny breeze somehow as everyone in the car is beading up with sweat in
literally every nook and cranny on your body.
Finally after about 45 minutes we started moving and started to get some
air movement which was exceptionally exciting.
After about another hour and a half we had successfully made it
home!
Lucas was then off to soccer practice, and Bekah started
making dinner. Bekah was very thankful
she had planned a casserole so she could just throw it in the oven pretty
easily. However after about 20 minutes,
she went to check on it, and the gas bottle had gone out. Usually our landlord has a few spares sitting
downstairs so it wasn’t that big of a deal, other than when Bekah got
downstairs and there weren’t any full bottles.
Cereal all around for supper!
Obviously some days go better than others no matter where
you live. It seems here in West Africa
though, many days can go like this. You
can’t rely on much or be too upset if the things on your “to-do list” don’t get
done. Some days you just have to say
WAWA (West Africa Wins Again) and go to sleep hoping tomorrow things will work
out better!
