On one of my last few days in Dakar, I took a long walk home from a friend's house, spending about an hour shaking sand from my shoes and observing the street vendors. I realized it was moments like these, where I find myself at peace with my surroundings, that I am going to miss the most. To my right, a woman was almost done peeling a green orange, with one long chartreuse and white ribbon trailing from the end of her dull knife. Across the road, a man waved a long, red watering hose over a field of cinder blocks, as if by watering them a house would grow.
On this walk, the sights and smells of Dakar were their most vivid, the air teeming with the mixed aromas of baking croissants, bus fumes and body sweat. Meanwhile, a shop selling used windows stared at me, each and worn, as if sharing a tiny glimpse into the life of some old colonial house. Beside them, a series of broken refrigerators clustered into a small dirty corner, hopeless, brown, and empty.
On this walk, I saw dozens of women with infants strapped to their backs as they balanced enormous buckets of peanuts and sweatshirts and fresh fish on their heads, while men gathered around a three-legged foosball table to determine a new neighborhood champion. Taxis honked continuously and Wolof words were thrown haphazardly across the road in a desperate attempt to grab anyone's attention. Meanwhile, Akon competed against the Muslim call to prayer. I'm still not sure which is more influential.
I spent this time thinking about the beauty that manifests itself along these roads. It's an awkward beauty, a graceless happenstance of noise and stench that combined creates this personable country full of generous people. I thought going to Senegal would be hard, but it turns out leaving it was.
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