Car Rapide?

Every day, when I leave school and head for home, I take a car rapide, a colorful, hectic, reckless bus that careens down Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop at a whopping 30 miles per hour (when there's no traffic). Though this might seem slow, the potholes and sandy ditches transform each ride into a miniature roller coaster, constantly bumping and sliding and jerking back and forth. They're known to stop without notice, and more than once I've seen one car rapide nudge another to get it going again. (Everyone knows the worst seats are in the front, where you have full exposure to the dangers of each ride.)

These small buses are always crammed full of about 30 people, with five or six standing in the middle holding on to a rusty, filthy metal bar and at least three stuffed into a one-person seat up front. There's no personal space once aboard, and frequently strangers who are standing will hand whoever is seated a bag, a water bottle, or a baby to hold for a while. I suppose this fosters the spirit of community upon which Senegal prides itself.

Occasionally, I'll happen upon a fancy car rapide that's been decorated with colorful cardboard slides covering the cagey metal ceiling and sporting a freshly painted exterior. The front of every good car rapide screams "Alhamdoulilaahi" in bold letters, the borrowed-from-Arabic Wolof word for "thank God". The dashboard is often bejeweled with gris-gris, or marabout sanctioned protection amulets and beads to provide for safe passage, along with a framed photograph of Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of Senegal's much celebrated Mouride Islamic brotherhood. The back of the driver's seat is usually also covered with photographic paraphernalia, either more images of Ahmadou Bamba or photos of famous Senegalese mud wrestlers - super buff men wearing skimpy jeweled wrestling uniforms, vicious scowls, and fancy flip-flops. Car rapides have open windows that allow for a nice breeze, providing a much more comfortable ride than the American-style Dakar Dem Dikk buses. During the rainy season, an easily accessible tarp is dropped to keep passengers (mostly) dry. The apprenti, or money collector, is always a young teenage boy who carelessly hangs off the back, ushering people into the bus, taking fare (a mere 75 CFA, the equivalent of about 15 cents!), and anouncing necessary stops to the driver by banging a coin or a knuckle against the metal frame. If you're lucky, you get to hang off the back with him and reap the full benefits of a breeze. Of course as a female foreigner, this is never awarded to me; instead I get cozy with the locals.