When the loudspeaker voice calling prayers in the nearby mosque startled me from sleep the next morning I discovered after one night in Dakar Eva, 6 months old, was covered in mosquito bites. Poor baby! The taxi driver on the way into the city taught me to say mosquito in French. The word sounds like moo-stee-k or moose teak.
The Global Marine office was busy with people everywhere coming and going, unlike the day before. The secretary from the day before saw us and rushed up and took the baby. Said she thought Eva had chicken pox. (She said , she had them as a child and was immune.) She gave us back my passport with it's brand new Visa stamp and sent us to a pediatrician...even called a cab that was waiting for us when we exited the building and the driver knew right where to take us.
The language barrier hit us squarely when we got to the doctor's office. It was a matter of us not understanding what anyone said then following wherever we were led to take Eva's vital signs. I guess if they needed any answers or payment they called Global Marine's office. The doctor tried a few times and ways to tell me it was not something...probably chicken pox and that it was bites. Good thing I understood "moose-teak". He wrote a prescription and I think they tried to tell me where to fill it but I don't know. The taxi driver understood pharmacy though and brought me to a store where I got it filled. That was not the end of my problem though. The pharmacist gave me an envelope with a dozen little glass tubes... the kind that had been used (a long time before 1968) to hold perfume samples. The end of the glass tube was a bubble that you would break off to release a tiny bit, a little smell of the contents. What to do with that, I wondered? A taxi driver once again helped me. He said it was an insect repellant to put nearby where the baby would be sleeping to ward off the moose-teaks. Good thing I didn't use it as an ointment or an oral dose!!
Next stop, we went to see our landlord. He was a roly-poly-smiley Lebanese man behind a huge desk in a bare office. His name was Nasrallah. His English was easy to understand and when he saw Eva he understood the problem and showed us an apartmemt downtown upstairs above a dentist's office and furnished in every room. We spent one more night at the big unfurnished gated house this time surrounded by the smell of insect repellant. One more evening call to prayer at night, and another alarming mosque call the next day. The 3rd day in Dakar we moved downtown.
Bob and I had two more days of his 7 days onshore before he bagan his 14 day offshore hitch. We spent them seeing the sights. We visited the bank so I could get money when I needed. We visited the open market. We were followed by hawkers and sellers with ebony masks and filigreed jewelry. We went to a cafe and ordered off a menu written in French. We visited a hotel where the unspoused workers stayed, La Croix du Sud. I ordered pomme de terre frites with mayonaise and the waiter made fresh mayonaise right at my table. I called a lady carrying a basket of flowers on her head over to offer her a dollar to buy a bunch and when she shook her head "no" I offered her 2 dollars more and she took the money and left the whole basket, all the flowers included. We visited a butcherie where we bought a pound of sliced ham. We visited a bakery where we bought fresh croissants. We went to a little corner store near the house and I found gerber baby food and spam and french bread baguettes. We bought an old fashioned "walker" the kind that is a folding metal frame with a cloth seat. We bought a handmade quilt for the bed and a handle pan for the stove. Both days flew by and before I knew it Bob was gone and I had 14 days to fill, just me and Eva.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Dakar, Senegal, West Africa
I arrived in Dakar right before Christmas, but it didn't seem like it because below the equator the seasons are opposite of the seasons above the equator. Also, West Africa has so many different religions that don't celebrate that particular holiday. There is little decoration and no Christmas caroling or music. My memories from there are spotty because I stayed very busy the 3 1/2 months, December to April that I was there. A baby grows and changes a lot during the 2nd half of it's 1st year.
When we first arrived, me carrying a baby and a diaper bag and pushing another bag along with my foot, we were put in line to go through customs. At the window I could not understand what anyone was saying. It was all French but with a thick accent-- then I heard Bob's voice behind a barrier so I could not see him, but he could hear me saying, ''I don't understand.'' And I heard him say, ''Tell them three days.'' Apparently I came in with a visitor's visa and the first thing we needed to do was take a taxi to the Global Marine office to give them my passport and visa to get it properly stamped. The city seemed to be in the desert and on the long ride from Dakar's airport I saw stretches of sand and buildings that looked like they were made of sand and people riding camels and cars, many more cars than I imagined would be with us on that desert road.
Beyond the desert we came into a city with storied buildings that seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. If it had not been for the buildings that were not tall enough to be called skyscrapers, I might have thought I was in Houston with the glass windows housing stores and shops of every ilk along the entirety of each city block. It looked a little like New Orleans with balconies on the faces of buildings and locked gates leading to courtyards between the walls and the glass of the doors and windows.
At the Global Marine office there was one secretary behind a desk who took my passport and said she would take care of it. She cooed over the baby Eva and told me where some American friends I knew , Gary and Callie Blackorby and their children Ronnie and Sissy, were living in Dakar.
The place Bob had rented was back toward the desert but I could see houses and businesses and a mosque. He'd rented the main part of a huge adobe house. We opened and entered through a locked gate in a rock wall in a silent neighborhood. The house was mostly empty and so huge and so empty our voices echoed. Bob said it was in the process of being furnished by the landlord. There was a mattrass in one room, and a chest of drawers.
That first night Eva slept in a drawer next to our bed. The kitchen was empty but had lots and lots of countertop and two cook stoves, a big one with an oven and another with two big burners, no oven, but a cupboard below that had a butane bottle inside. It was hot in Dakar, in our house, and tho there was a bathroom with a shower, the water was cold because we hadn't gotten fuel to light the little 5-gallon hot water heater.
There were windows but no way to close them and no screens. Bob told me the landlord had sent men to install screens, and that they'd put wooden slats into the centers of the ledges around the windows. As they were leaving and Bob was asking when they would return to install the screens, the foreman said to him, "Finis. Finis." I have seen that French word at the end of movies and think that it means, " The End."
When we first arrived, me carrying a baby and a diaper bag and pushing another bag along with my foot, we were put in line to go through customs. At the window I could not understand what anyone was saying. It was all French but with a thick accent-- then I heard Bob's voice behind a barrier so I could not see him, but he could hear me saying, ''I don't understand.'' And I heard him say, ''Tell them three days.'' Apparently I came in with a visitor's visa and the first thing we needed to do was take a taxi to the Global Marine office to give them my passport and visa to get it properly stamped. The city seemed to be in the desert and on the long ride from Dakar's airport I saw stretches of sand and buildings that looked like they were made of sand and people riding camels and cars, many more cars than I imagined would be with us on that desert road.
Beyond the desert we came into a city with storied buildings that seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. If it had not been for the buildings that were not tall enough to be called skyscrapers, I might have thought I was in Houston with the glass windows housing stores and shops of every ilk along the entirety of each city block. It looked a little like New Orleans with balconies on the faces of buildings and locked gates leading to courtyards between the walls and the glass of the doors and windows.
At the Global Marine office there was one secretary behind a desk who took my passport and said she would take care of it. She cooed over the baby Eva and told me where some American friends I knew , Gary and Callie Blackorby and their children Ronnie and Sissy, were living in Dakar.
The place Bob had rented was back toward the desert but I could see houses and businesses and a mosque. He'd rented the main part of a huge adobe house. We opened and entered through a locked gate in a rock wall in a silent neighborhood. The house was mostly empty and so huge and so empty our voices echoed. Bob said it was in the process of being furnished by the landlord. There was a mattrass in one room, and a chest of drawers.
That first night Eva slept in a drawer next to our bed. The kitchen was empty but had lots and lots of countertop and two cook stoves, a big one with an oven and another with two big burners, no oven, but a cupboard below that had a butane bottle inside. It was hot in Dakar, in our house, and tho there was a bathroom with a shower, the water was cold because we hadn't gotten fuel to light the little 5-gallon hot water heater.
There were windows but no way to close them and no screens. Bob told me the landlord had sent men to install screens, and that they'd put wooden slats into the centers of the ledges around the windows. As they were leaving and Bob was asking when they would return to install the screens, the foreman said to him, "Finis. Finis." I have seen that French word at the end of movies and think that it means, " The End."
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