The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 12

This morning I awoke to hear the most glorious of sounds: rain. What's more, I was cold. I thought, I've been magically transported to England, and as I lay curled up in bed listening to the thunder and rain, I thought, that was the first night I have slept the whole night through without getting up to get water, chase a mosquito out of my net, have a cold shower or check to see whether the electricity had come back on and I could charge my computer. What's more, it stayed 'cold' (ie: I could wear a vest, singlet, tank-top without pouring with sweat) until about now, 9pm, when I am back to sweating again.

Remember the sea urchin spine?

Yesterday, while i was out in the street learning Wolof with Now (we had no electricity yesterday either and once my battery was flat, there was no more working unless it was in pencil), my right arm started to hurt. The skin felt sore to touch and my fingers ached. A weird sensation. I went to town to buy a swim suit and a swimming hat. That was an experience. As I flicked through a rack of 12 tiny swim suits at the country's biggest sports shop I began to despair that I would ever find one my size, but then Omar popped his head around the rack and I knew all would be OK. Omar is the only man in the country who knows about customer care, he's the only man in the shop who says things like, "you need that in a 42? let me look'. The others say things like, "you need that in a 42? let me look" and then they disappear off to lunch.

Omar and I sorted through a lot of swimming costumes, all size 36, until we found one in my size, and since it was the only one in the shop (and therefore the country), I didn't have the luxury to stop and consider whether or not it looked good. Once we had the suit, it was time to chose the hat. Omar was concerned that the cap matched the swim suit so after trying on a lot of hats, and doing a lot of giggling, we chose the silver one. It can only make me go faster.

After that I went to meet naomi. I was sitting on a harmless-looking metal electric box thing outside this shop, and I leant my elbow on the metal grate on the window and suddenly I was flying off my seat- I had been electrocuted, but not enough to kill me, just cause me sever pain.

Well, I got over that and managed to go to a good reggae concert with a friend who's just come over from London (with 2 pounds of cheese and a loaf of organic poppy seed bread as a gift) but at about 2am I started to get a headache and I realised that the weird tingling and sore skin had spread around my head and infact all down the right side of my body. Probably cerebral malaria, I thought, and had another glass of wine. Or maybe, said Catherine, you've got sea urchin spine poisoning. Now there's something I hadn't though of, and it's true that bits of the spine were still at that point in my foot. When my head started to pound I went home.

This morning I awoke with a weird rash on my neck.

"I'm worried about you," said Naomi. Well, you know, you're probably always OK but here, people die of stuff a lot and so it's easy for a headache to become in your mind a deadly cocktail of TB-Cholera-Typhoid. Luckily we had no electricity so I could only work until my battery ran out, and since it was cold I stayed in my pyjamas all day and hung out with Now at his shop where I got loads of sympathy for being on death's door. In the afternoon, my illnesses cleared up and I dug out the remainder of the sea urchin spine and I was OK.

But of a crap ending to the story I know.

But here's something that'll crack you up. I hope to God that no one important reads this, like the editor of the Sunday Times, who was reading this very blog only last week.



We had had no power for eight hours today, and we were starting to get bored. So I decided to try on my swim suit. And then the hat and goggles followed and before I knew it I was posing for the camera. I feel I have already lost a lot of respect out there for posting the picture of me in a red swimming cap so it can't get any worse. Actually, it was Karen who goaded me into putting up there, but then, she hadn't seen it at that point. Maybe she'll think differently about it now.

Anyway, all of this is to tell you that I didn't swim today because of the cerebral malaria and yesterday because I was buying the Very Serious Swim Suit and getting electrocuted but my brother and his girlfriend Mati have now said they'll give me £50 if I do the swim and £100 if I finish it which means if I don't start some serious training very soon then I'm going to deprive the kids of £50.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 10

One of my latest articles has been on a koranic school in Dakar and the work that a friend of mine, Pape, has been doing with the children there.



The boy in the photo was sent from his home in Casamance at the age of 5 to Dakar to study the Koran at a kind of religious boarding school. Such is the culture of religious schools in Dakar ( as opposed to their village versions where the children are generally treated much better), many of the kids are sent out to beg for their food and are very often beaten for not bringing in enough money. They are usually malnourished, abused, and never get a modern education (although that being said, there are some schools where the children get a good education and are well treated).

My friend Pape, a poet, film writer and ex-NGO worker, has been working with a school in his neighbourhood of Dakar for 2 years. He has managed to build up a good relationship with the teacher and change the way things are done in the school, so much so that the teacher has now set up his own association where he and 6 other school teachers try to find alternative sources of income and educate other people about the rights of children. The children in this school no longer beg, nor are they beaten, and they now do extra curricular subjects such as French and photography as well as play football with children from the neighbourhood, which is not allowed at other schools.

One of Pape's projects is buying chairs and tents for the school, which are then rented out for ceremonies, providing a regular income for the school. This money gets the children hot food, clothes, medicine, and means they are no longer forced into the streets to beg.



I have spent a few days at the school and they are really lovely happy boys, despite the terrible conditions they live in. And I would really like to help them buy more chairs and clean up the place where they sleep, which is one tiny dirty room in a derelict house where 15 of them sleep on a mat on the bare floor.

This is where my swimming challenge comes in.

You all know that I'm doing the swimming challenge right, and now that I've done the Ngor Island swim I think I might be able to do the Goree Island swim, which is 3 times as far. I've decided to raise money for Pape's school by asking people for sponsorship.

The money will go to Pape to be spent either on chairs to rent out or on cleaning up the room where they live, perhaps buying mats, basic medicine etc. I would also like some of the money to go to Pape, who in 2 years has never received a penny for his work, despite being presently out of paid employment (although he has just had his film script accepted in Paris).

Since sending out an email to friends about this, I have raised £200, which can buy a lot of things for the kids. If this generosity keeps up, I'm going to split the money between the school and another informal project which Pape has going with some friends of his from the States, who regularly donate money. When a 13 year old girl came to his house in Dakar asking for work, he asked her why she wasn't at school. She said she had left her village to find work and no longer went to school. Pape has now found enough money to support her and another young girl through school and university.

If I raise enough money I will give this money towards supporting another young girl through her education.

If you would like to sponsor me, please email me and let me know how much you'd like to give. I will have a PayPal account set up or if you have a British bank account you can do a direct deposit or send a cheque to my address in London.

In other (swimming) news, the pool was shut yesterday so I decided to go body boarding instead. I have new flippers and thought it would be a good idea to test them out on the wild piece of coast near my house. I cycled off with my board strapped to the back of my bike and arrived an hour before sunset, beautiful clear water and only two surfers in it.

"There are sea urchins everywhere" says this guy who has to come down to the beach to tell me how to get into the water (the rocks and pounding waves evidently confusing me).

Well, I'm not going to tread on one, say I to myself, and plunge into the rocky frothy water and paddle off into the sunset (literally).

"Why aren't you taking any of the waves?" says this not unattractive surfer guy, as I bob up and down pretending I'm just happy hanging out without taking any of the waves. I don't tell him it's because the waves are 10 feet high and I'm terrified that one of them will take me on my board and dump me on the sea urchiny rocks.

"What, you've never done this before?" he asks, "Be careful" he adds, and looks at his friend with raised eyebrows.

Well, it was fun (I have done it before a few times, just not right there, with the rocks and the huge breakers and the spiny sea creatures) and relaxing, and a nice thing to do after a day in an office.

But getting out was a whole other deal. Feeling the eyes of the surfers on me as I start for the first time in my life praying, and paddling really really quickly, I reach the rocky shore just in time to get my flippers off before a wave comes and, crunch, put my foot down on something really quite sharp. But since my whole body was hurting, a hurt foot didn't seem like too big a deal and after having a conversation with another surfer about how my board is designed for a small child (he held up an adult one to show me how inadequaltely equipped I am- "I don't know who's going to fix your back if this board snaps mid wave"), I peddled off home.

Arriving home, (there's not much more, I promise), I find the power is cut. And it stays cut until 4pm this afternoon. So with my computer battery dead, I spend much of the day swatting flies (oh, and swimming 1km at lunch time), and only see the black poisonous-looking spine in my foot in the morning, when I also see that I can't walk. Poor Naomi is given a needle to dig it out.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 8

Only three weeks left until the big swim.



Yesterday I endured a highly stressful day reviewing Dakar's beautiful Meridien President hotel at Almadies, Africa's most westerly point. To make sure my readers are given up to date information on where to stay in Dakar, I spent many hours testing the water quality of the pool, scrutinising the views from various parts of the gorgeous beach-side complex including from the jacuzzi, and seeing if the towels were as fluffy as they should be. I can report that all seemed to be up to a good standard. So my swiming yesterday involved about 7 lengths of the 25 metre pool, not really a 'training' day then, but so enjoyable, clean, peaceful and no pumping Senegalese pop music, which is what we get at the public pool and which makes the experience of swimming 1.5km even more stressful.

Today was the End-of-Week-One sea swim. I'm not scared of under tows, rips, currents, drowning or sharks, but I am afraid of sea weed touching my toes or of a small fish nibbling at my elbow. I also don't like swimming when the water is full of goat hair. Ngor beach is Dakar's Blackpool Beach, except there's a densely populated fishing village at one end of the bay and there they believe that the beach is for livestock and dumping rubbish, because, well, that's where they've always done it. The fact that the bay has now become a big hang-out for tourists and locals doesn't meant that villagers have stopped giving their goats baths in the water.

After staying out until 4 this morning listening to a great Senegalese-French jazz band (called Moussa Diouf), Cecilia, Alistair, Naomi and I convened at Ngor beach for our first sea swim. Alistair had been out drinking until 5, apparently, and has also done no training for it, but his enthusiasm overcame both of those small obstacles and we were very happy to have him with us. Cecilia is my swimming buddy and she was also wearing a swimming hat so that I didn't feel like the only idiot on the beach. Naomi was charged with carrying the bags across on the pirogue (which ran out of petrol half-way across so that we almost beat her across).



And so we set off, after much discussion about the best place to cross, eventually choosing the village end of the beach, and the goat-washing end. I kept my mouth well closed until we were out half way across and the water became clear and lovely.



After being afraid of the fish and the 700 metre swim, it really wasn't a big deal and only took 18 minutes. On the other side we had lunch in a lovely breezy cafe and decided to swim back as well. My gorgeous red bonnet split before I'd launched off on the return leg (even though it was only the third time I've used it), so I am now without-hat but tomorrow I'm off down to City Sport to buy a new hat, swimming costume and flippers (for my next challenge- body boarding).

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 5

24 days to go until the big swim.

Here's a picture of my local hair dresser in Dakar.

Swimming for an hour somehow manages to take up four hours of my time. On Tuesday, Naomi and I braved the office of the lady who sells the season tickets for the pool. We were directed and re-directed from one door to the next, barred from entering the door we needed on the basis that the guard there had the power to bar us, until we found the Lady Who Can.

She sat at her desk shuffling through bits of paper, a fan whirring in the corner of the room. We handed over the 15,000 Cfa (£15) for ten swims and she handed us a receipt. We thought that would be it, but no, we must come back the next day to collect our cards. This all took half an hour.

So today we went back, hoping to collect our cards and never see her again. She shuffled through an envelope of cards, ever so slowly, and then looked at us over her glasses and said, no, our cards weren't ready yet. When we asked her what possibly there was to do that couldn't be done in a second, she said that each little card had to be signed by the director of the swimming pool and that he was away 'on mission' which is Senegalese speak for, gone on holiday, doesn't have time for signing bits of paper, or just that no one has got around to handing him the papers to sign.

She said we might like to come back tomorrow and I asked if the director would be back tomorrow. No, she said. Maybe Tuesday. I asked what the point would be in coming back tomorrow then and she barked that I had only had to come there once before, as if wasting half an hour trying to get past the guard and through the doors to find her office every single time I wanted to swim wasn't a waste of time.

The bureaucracy of this place is stifling, suffocating, and at times I just can't bear it. It's there to justify the existence of people like Madam Swimming Tickets and must make people like Monsiuer Director feel like he's drowning under a pile of millions of little cards.

Well, I swam a km and a half and bought myself a nice red swimming hat. Then my swimming buddies and I went out for lunch and by the time we had got back home (after taking the wrong bus) four hours had been eaten up.

Well, luckily I hadn't hoped to do any work today because yesterday my day was stressful and tiring enough and I thought I would take the day off. I was out interviewing young men about their attempts to take the wooden fishing boats to the Canary Islands, and it involved driving up and down through the swealtering suburbs of Dakar trying to find people who would talk to me about how they would rather die than stay in this country. They all told me the same thing: we need work. Not work so they can buy fancy cars, but work that will bring in just £90 a month so they can feed their families.

It was a very sobering day and reminded me of what my friend Now told me this week, that I know nothing about Senegal and the suffering of people here. I have young male friends who would be too proud to show me how they feel at not having work- we sit and drink tea and play music and it gives you the impression that everything is OK, that there's no work but there is always a bowl of rice to be found somewhere. But I saw another side, and I felt sad.

So my long-running battle with the apartment rental agency over the separation of our water meters is coming to an end- I feel the end is nigh. For the last year I've been sharing the water bill with the evil woman who lives downstairs, who is not the kind of woman to turn taps off when she's not using them. She has a washing machine AND two full-time maids (for only three of them). After many months of visits to the agency and the water company, today we received the papers which say we can have our own water meter. All we have to do is go and pay £14 to the water company to sign up.

"Plus £5 for transport," said Djibi, our rental agent as he stood in the apartment with some coiffed woman lurking in the background.

"What transport?" I aked.

"You know, transport, to speed things up..."

A bribe, then.

It's not the money, and I know first hand how slow things can be if you don't bribe, (three visits to the electricity company to get my name on the electricity bill), but I am morally against bribing and I feel cross that I have to do it. To say that everyone does it so you have to do it too is not a reason- it's just a self-serving act to serve the greedy, filling the pockets of the people who already have jobs.

So do I carry on for three more months waiting for the papers or do I pay the money and get it done in a Senegalese instant?

The Dakar-Goree challenge: Day 3

The Piscine Olympique is shut on Mondays, so we are already on Day 3, and only 5 days until the Ngor island warm-up.

I spent much of the morning on the phone to my bank in England trying to work out how I can open an American bank account so that all the useless dollars I get paid in can be transformed into something useful without having to pay $20 each time. Then it was time for swimming. I set myself 25 lengths but I managed 30, which is 1.5km. I'm going to try and do that every day plus my island swim ang hope that gets me into shape.

I am now back at the office, just getting around to lunch, and it's gone 3pm. I have a deadline looming for Thursday, and just found out I have to interview Youssous N'Dour tomorrow morning. I'm tired, hungry, wondering how the hell I will ever manage to swim and do my job and have energy for all the other stuff which takes so much time in Senegal, like finding food, moving around and paying bills.

I've been commissioned a piece by the Sunday Times to write about immigrants taking boats to Spain. I now have to find some of these guys, and get them to agree to talk. I feel nervous at the thought, but I know I will work it out somehow. I just wish I didn't have to spend three hours every day getting to the damn swimming pool, wandering around trying to find the woman who sells tickets, and then trawling up and down the pool as if I find it enjoyable.

The Dakar-Goree challenge: Day 1

It's been a topsy-turvy kind of couple of weeks and so in a effort to get myself focused on something, take my mind off absent friends and dysfunctional relationships, I have decided to go into training. In one month's time I will be swimming the Dakar-Goree swim, a 5 kilometer cross-the-ocean marathon, from the mainland to Goree island.

All of this is Julia's fault. Julia is from Norfolk, an English teacher and sports freak, who I have taken to hanging out with because she also makes me laugh, a lot. But she also apparently gets me into sporting situations I might not otherwise have found myself in and here I am, buying goggles and swimming hats and trying to source talcum powder (because all new sporting activities start with the purchasing of expensive and pretty outfits- I also now need a new bikini) and going swimming, every day.

This morning I went with Julia to the Olympic Swimming Pool. I swam 20 lengths, which is a kilometer, and it wasn't too painful. Tomorrow the pool is closed so I have 6 days to prepare myself for our first sea-swim, which is to swim to Ngor island, 700 metres. It doesn't sound like much but it's the sea, and there are fish, and there's no stopping after 50 metres to get the steam out of the goggles. Also, Julia has just announced that she's going away tomorrow, for a month. She'll arrive in Dakar on the 18th September. The Dakar-Goree swim is on the 17th. So she got me into it because she needs someone to experience it for her- she's not going to be here.

When she roped me into it, she told me it was 3km. I can do 3km, it's not all that bad. But today when I went to the pool I asked the life guard for some info and he left all the little kids foundering in the water to tell me about it.

"To keep in line with international swimming standards, we have changed the course of the swim- it's now 5 kilomters."

Now 5 klicks I really don't think I can do. Today I tried doing front crawl but breathing on the left hand side and I got so tired. It turns out I am really weak on that side, which poses a problem, because only half of me is fit.

"But there will be firemen and the military to pull you out and into a boat if you get tired."

That sounds better to me. Naomi and Now promise they will come along and bring peanut butter sandwiches for me, and moral support. I reckon I can do 3 klicks, and it's not a race and it's not for sponsorship or charity, so I am aiming for 3 and anything else will be a bonus.

Wish me luck!