Was that a CAT I Saw?!

October 25, 2008

“Now I see why this place is undiscovered,” Kerri remarked wryly. We had just spent 2.5 hours sitting in Dakar traffic trying to make our way to a resort area called Toubab Dialaw. Once we got to Rufisque, we had arranged to rendezvous at the big baobab tree so that we could be shown the shortcut to the highway.

“Promise me we’re not really meeting at a TREE,” I said in utter disbelief. “It is a hotel or something called the Great Baobab, right?” Sure enough, it was in fact a tree – on est en Afrique - but as always, things did work out as planned; we got to the highway in record time thanks to our guide and turned off at a village called Yene. From there we spotted various hand-lettered signs for Sobobade, our hotel, and found ourselves bouncing down a pitted dirt road guaranteed to set your granny’s hemorrhoids aflame.

We rolled into the hotel parking lot around 9 pm and set off for the restaurant, where insects of various shapes and sizes had us intermittently squealing and jumping out of our seats. Then, to our horror, we spied a rat. A rat so huge and well-fed, in fact, that Mags had thought it was a cat.

When we saw another, we asked the waitress about it: “How many rats do
you think there are here?”
“Oh,” she said reassuringly. “I think there’s only the one.”
“But we just saw one there, and then another in the corner opposite.”
“Don’t you suppose it is just the one qui fait le tour (who’s going
around, taking his evening constitutional)?” she suggested with an
unruffled air.
We didn’t buy it, but we appreciated her very Senegalese attempt to
make us feel better by offering another possible interpretation of a
rather off-putting reality.
The next morning, there was some consternation involving the
procurement of feminine hygiene products, so I offered to accompany my
friend on a walk to the local pharmacy. The young man behind the
counter was happily extremely well-versed in the world of Kotex and
Tampax, and he was so very charming besides that we took a picture. We
were serenaded with ‘Toubab, toubab” by the little ones as we walked
through the village (at least here the word has a positive
connotation, as the village is named in honor of a European who did
much good for the locals), and so I talked my friend into buying some
candy for the fun of distributing it. (I, at least, had lots of fun
taking pictures while she was mobbed from all sides by hordes of
delighted children…she told me afterwards she did not think it had
been such as hot idea, for which I would like to apologize most
formally).
The next evening we attended a fabulous Congolese drum concert at a
local Italian restaurant – the five or six drummers ran around and
danced, leaping into the air without ever missing a beat, even on the
tall drums that stood on three wooden legs - it was quite astonishing.
At the end of the performance the drummers were dripping with
perspiration from every pore – they had played with all their heart
and soul for two hours or so, and it was what you might call an
extreme workout, I would say.

Had we had longer than just the weekend at our Moorish-inspired paradise complete with a Rapunzel tower overlooking the ocean, we might have arranged for drumming and dance lessons as well, but for the most part we were contented just to walk along the beach, to drink in the salt air and the view of the
weatherbeaten wooden pirogues and the fantastically-colored laundry drying on the sand. It was a lazy time, full of hammock-hanging and floating in the salty water, only occasionally rousing ourselves from
our lethargy long enough to join the local kids in the Senegalese equivalent of Monkey in the Middle. The joy and enthusiasm these kids exude is one of the things I love most about being here, and it
compensates for many, many of the conveniences I miss about my former life…

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com