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.
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