Wrapping up presents alone in my hot and dusty apartment has made me feel homesick, especially when listening to the BBC at the same time and hearing tales of snow and advent calendars and carol concerts. I'm going to London tonight, but still, I feel particularly non-festive, even if I have got the obligatory Christmas cold.

All of this has made me feel pretty emotional. Someone who I thought was a good friend to me failed to perform the most basic of friend favours this week, while someone I hardly know rang me when he woke up this morning to see if my cold was any better. A beggar in the street wished me good morning, while people I have known for years have forgotten to ring me to wish me a good trip away. I am confused about my position here, I feel so foreign in a place I regarded as my home. It has thrown me topsy-turvy.

I have had a gas leak in my kitchen since Sunday when I broke the gas head which plugs into the cooker. There are no hardware shops in town, only handbag shops, so I can look nice but I can't fix a gas leak. In desperation, Omar the tailor took me to a place he knew, not allowing me to go alone because it being the day before the big muslim festival of tabaski, the whole world is out in the street buying last minute things, and everyone is desperate for cash. It's not safe for me, he said.

In one shop, the man said he didn't have what we were looking for. Then he turned to me, gave a great big fake smile, and said in wolof, "hello you. How are you?" as if he were talking to a child. I replied hello and Omar pulled me out of the shop.

"Senegalese are not normal to treat a foreigner like that," he said. I was glad he had seen what idiots people can turn into when they see a white person. I have many friends who tell me I am exaggerating when I say people act differently to me than to other Senegalese. No one wants to think that their countrymen are capable of being effected by the colour of someone's skin (I can't use the 'R' word here). But it's a fact I deal with every day. Toubabs are like something you might find in the circus. We are a constant source of amusement. And Omar, I am pleased to see, thinks it uncivilised.

I am happy to say though that some things are sacred. Now is going to get up at 3am to accompany me to the airport.

On Wednesday night, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Africa’s most famous reggae singer, did a concert in Dakar. Like his music or not, he is the most influential musician on the continent today, driving fear into the politicians he denounces in his songs, and stirring up the crowds of dissatisfied youth who, living under often-oppressive political regimes, have little other believable leadership to listen to.

His big hit at the moment in Senegal is a song called ‘Open the borders,’ and asks why ‘they’ should be able to apply for a visa to an African country and travel the very same day when ‘we’, Africans, are unlikely to ever get visas to visit Europe. ‘We only want to travel, and also work,’ Tiken sings in his raspy reggae voice, ‘but we didn't refuse you your visas.’

On Wednesday night we had sat through a handful of hip-hop performances, waiting for Tiken to come on. One of my favourite artists, Xuman, did his piece and finished it off with a quick verbal attack on the government, at which point the organisers cut his microphone and he was ushered off the stage. When Tiken Jah did finally arrive, late and clearly tired, the momentum was a little lost. Still, he pounded out the old classics, including one of my favourites, 'Quitte le pouvoir' (leave the power), in which he changed the words of one chorus to (translation from French), 'if you love Senegal, get out of power'.

The next afternoon, a colleague called me to see if I had heard the news. The Interior Minister had banned Tiken Jah from the country. His criticisms during the concert had not escaped the president's notice and from now on, he would be persona no grata, unable to come back to the country where he is a living legend. Considering riots rocked Dakar just a month ago, with young people making it clear they are no longer going to put up with the unjustified spending of public cash while the average Jo fights to even earn enough to feed themselves, it seemed a brave decision. The days of freedom of speech in Senegal might be well and truly over.

*****

Last night, with a plane to catch at 6am, my visiting friend showed enthusiasm for one last night out in Dakar. I wasn't sure what was on and at midnight, we were still sitting at home contemplating the outing over G and Ts. I couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere new and different to go to, since we have been to at least one concert a night for the last 8 days. It suddenly came to me: an old dark bar I used to go to when I first lived here, when I had a boyfriend who played in a band. Jo and I got our best Saturday-night-in-Dakar outfits on and set off for Keur Adriene in some dark corner of the city.

At the door we were met by a dreadlocked singer, who insisted on telling us he was from Paris, and then showed us to some seats inside the long, dark room. A fish tank had been added to the rear wall since my last visit almost three years ago, and some flashing lights had been strung up along the side wall, presumably with Christmas in mind. But other than that, it was all the same, a few hookers at the bar, rows of low tables and plastic chairs set on a cracked concrete floor, and men drinking cheap beer and looking bored. It felt good to be back.

The band, who had the unfortunate luck of being positioned in a corner of the room infront of a huge screen playing silent Lucky Dube music clips, were warming up with some elevator-music standards. "It's not terrible," said Jo, optimistically. We decided to stay.

The waiter came along, a fat man in a baseball shirt and cap, and asked gruffly what we wanted to drink. Jo said she wanted water. He looked annoyed and said there wasn't any. "What, none at all?" she asked. "No," he said.

"Well, I'll share her drink then," she said. Gin in this country comes in triple measures and one is enough for a small army.

"You have to have your own," he said, really pissed off.

"Even if you don't have what I want? Ok, I'l have a Coke."

The waiter brought our drinks, and when he came back with the change, he screwed the note up in his hand and threw it at me.

"He's not a natural," Jo said.

Next, a young guy came up to me and whispered in my ear, "They don't have that in France!" nodding to the band who had started some quick-fire sabar drum playing.

"Well, quite possibly not, but then I'm not from France," I replied, not hiding the fact that I hate being confused for a French person.

"Do you have an email address?" he asked.

"No."

"All French people have an email address," he said, unwittingly spitting on me, before storming off.

Luckily the singer, whose name I didn't catch even when I went up to him afterwards and tried to find out who they were, was fantastic. As much energy as a young Youssou, two sabar drummers who looked like they had been dragged out of bed by their older brother to play for him but were in fact the best drummers I have seen in a long time, and a tama player in Malcolm X glasses who danced with his little talking drum tucked under his arm and set the entire place on fire. It was arse-shaking silly dancing all round, sexy women with tiny tops billowing up to the tama-player and shaking their buttocks until he could drum no more and men in flat caps losing themselves in this incredibly loud, fast rhythm, blissfully unaware of how silly, to foreign eyes, it could all look. It was one of those moments where I thought, if I had to capture 'Dakar' in one real scene, this would be it, and how lucky I was to be there.

I had a visitor this week. His name is Guillame. He is 2 weeks old, smells like new babies should, and in 3 months, when Mary Helene gets back from her maternity leave, he's going to be sleeping in a bucket in my flat, while his mother works, every Tuesday and Friday. I can't wait.

I wrote a little about the forced removal of the lepers in my street some weeks back, and the 'walking markets', guys who sell stuff informally in the road. Except it's not so informal; it's the mainstay of Senegalese commerce. People are frustrated; there were some violent riots while I was in Ghana, so bad they made it onto the pages of the Guardian.

What is so shocking to everyone about this is that Senegal is, and has always been, the cheri of the west's eyes. While the rest of the region is either mid-conflict, post-conflict or in the hands of drug barons, Senegal remains relatively peaceful and 'democratic'. It suits everyone's agenda for it to remain, and remain looking, that way. So the attacks on uncomfortably vocal activists, journalists and musicians, the student riots, the underhand treatment of the ex-Prime Minister who was fired for calling the President's son to the national Assembly to explain spending on the infrastructure for the 2-day Islamic Conference next year (somewhere in the region of £90 million for useless road projects alone), have been glossed over by all except the frustrated few in the country. Except now those frustrated people are becoming a big beast that, by the look of the riots two weeks ago,is growing in numbers and force. People have started to sit up, notice, and take action.

This week is my 7 year anniversary of my relationship with Senegal. I have been thinking about the changes which have gone on during my time here and I was left feeling really sad. The gap between rich and poor is excessive, and not just that the rich are getting massively richer but the poor are getting massively poorer. I find it hard to find a budget that I can survive on, and I am part of the rich. The cost of living is unlivable, and the President continues to make rash decisions that anger the growing numbers of unemployed, dissatisfied people who are no longer happy to say, 'ca va aller' and reach for the prayer beds. There is a real feeling in the air of violent frustration that is, sooner, rather than later, going to turn nasty.

But I thought I was just being dramatic, so kept my thoughts to myself. After all, can an intuition about a socio-political situation really be right?

This afternoon I met a friend at the supermarket (I must be rich), who is heavily involved in the music industry. We talked about the number of musicians who are starting to get vocal again, which is usually a good barometer for how the rest of the population are feeling. She said that in the next six months, she expects there will be a serious backlash against the government. Later, I was talking to a representative of a UN mission here, who told me that by next spring, a serious violent confrontation will have occurred, and he didn't mean another riot of shop-keepers throwing stones. He was talking about something much more serious. And I feel it too.

It is exciting, in a way, because what is bubbling under the surface will finally come to a head and maybe it will produce better results. Maybe, like happened in Guinea this year, people will be able to show that they have a voice and with it can make positive changes. But it also saddens me. Senegal has, in the words of every newspaper article about the place, been the bastion of peace and democracy in west Africa. But if you ask me, it's a false image that is just waiting to shatter.

I have friends coming this week from England, so I didn't want to write about the wildlife issues I am having at home, incase it put them off. But they are now far too busy to read blogs, as I have sent them off with shopping lists including things like cheddar, and conditioner that doesn't contain parabens, so I can tell all.

Last week I was going into the living room, also my bedroom, to have lunch when I noticed something that looked like a large stick on the floor. On closer inspection, and when the stick ran under my bed, I realised it was in fact a large lizard, and not a gecko, but a big scary black lizard which was sticking its tongue out and everything.

I screamed, shut the door, and ran downstairs to get my guardian, who I usually try not to have much to do with because of the way he stares at me in an inappropriate fashion, but he was the only person I know who's nearby who could help me. I told him the problem, that there was a lizard under my bed, and he started saying annoying things until he realised I was near-hysterical and better come upstairs quick.

On entering the bedroom, and realising that I was going to do nothing much more than stand at the door with it open a couple of centimetres and call instructions, he asked for a broom and proceeded to search under the bed for the offending creature. When he pulled the bed out from the wall, we found the ugly thing lurking in a corner. I screamed and locked myself in the kitchen. There was a lot of banging, then Cisse asked for a floor cloth, and a little while later he appeared holding the lizard in the cloth, white belly in full view, and proceeded to move towards me with the thing, which I estimate to be 20 cm long, until I got actually hysterical and locked myself on the balcony, which was as far away from it and him as I could get.

I have not slept well since. I live on the third floor; how did it get in? Is there a nest? Was it just the baby and is daddy still under there?

The wildlife issue did not stop there. This morning I was making coffee in the kitchen. I noticed that the little speckled eggs which I had seen last week but decided they were nothing dangerous, are still stuck to the kitchen door. They are now much bigger. They are perfectly round, speckled like quails' eggs, and stuck to the door. Anyway, I noticed that they were moving, and when I got down on the floor I saw that they were in fact hatching, and out were crawling little hairy millipede-type creatures, lots of them. They were small, compared to the lizard, so I didn't scream but I did douse them with insecticide and then squash them with the handy fly-swatter that my sister sent me and which has been the most useful thing I have ever had. At least they died at the hands of a Hawaiian flip-flop, a trendy way to go.

Where are these creatures coming from, and why?

Occasionally the telephone company makes a special offer on phone top-up cards, the way most of the population pays for their phone calls. 25,000 cfa (£25) will get you 37,500 cfa, 10,000 cfa will get you 15,000 cfa and so on. I walked along the streets quiet after Friday prayer, and saw a young guy flapping the orange cards in the way of passing pedestrians.

"Do you have 25,000?" I asked him.
"I have 10,000, and 5,000" he said.
"OK, but I want 25,000, so, thanks," I said and tried to walk away.
"But I have 10,000," the guy said, a little agressively. "It's the same thing."
"But it's not the same thing. Sorry."
"Buy 10,000," he almost shouted at me.

I tried the next guy.

"I have 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000. It's the same thing."

I could not argue with him.

Last missive from Ghana

Sunday

“The airplane will wait for you,” our representative from the cocoa co-op assured us.

“Check-in is now closed, and we have sold your seats,” the representative from the airline assured us, twenty minutes later.

“This sweet give you sperm,” the driver of the car which eventually had to take us all the way to Accra giggled as he handed us some nuts he’d bought from a boy at the traffic lights. The nuts tasted of coconut but left the grit of sawdust in the mouth.

Flying into Abidjan, felled palm trees looked like a game of Spilikin, sadly abandoned.

Ghana

Saturday

Three days in the cocoa forest was hard. We did not even sleep there, yet I came home every evening feeling thankful for hot water, soap, clean clothes, a soft bed and a fan.

The thing that was hardest for me was not having coffee. 5am starts, and 14-hour working days in the heat and humidity of the cocoa forest, and nothing to pick me up after lunch for the afternoon shift, or to get me going in the morning, was really tough. I had a headache every day, whether from dehydration of caffeine withdrawal, I do not know.

I can still eat with my hands, I was happy to discover, and eat things out of politeness that I would never have otherwise ingested. I can still spend 2 minutes in a toilet and hold my breath for the entirety, a useful tool in these parts, and I can hang around on the side of the road in the midday sun while the broken-down car gets fixed without getting agitated or losing faith that we’ll soon be on our way. But I can not go without coffee.

Ghana

Friday

Breakfast this morning was not the oily eggs and thick white bread which we had yesterday, but fresh boiled yam and a sauce made from coal-roasted cherry tomatoes (there’s something you could make a killing off at Borough Market), aubergines and dried fish, all ground together and mixed with violent red palm oil. The meal was eaten, with the hands, at the 21-acre farm of Mr Atta, an 83 year old man with thick white chest hair and all his own teeth. We walked for 2 miles through the dewy forest at day-break to get to this splendid example of exceptional health, both the owner and everything around him, through forests where the cocoa pods dripped from trees, nestling for space on the silvery trunks.

Mr Atta’s 14 year old grandson, Isaac, shares the small mud house with him, and before school cleans the compound and cooks breakfast. There are two other houses in the ‘village’, both mud homes where the farm labourers live. One of them, who spent the morning cutting the husks off coconuts for us to take back to the village, is from the north of Ghana. While we were eating the yams, crouched on stools around the tin bowl, he played the balafon in a dark corner of the cook-house, a young girl sitting near him scraping food from a bowl. The hot coals of fire hissed nearby.

“When I come home from school, when I have done all my jobs, I read my school books,” Isaac, the grandson, told me shyly. “When it gets dark, we have a lantern, so I can keep on reading.”

Isaac carried a basket containing 30 oranges and 10 coconuts on his head, the whole way to school for me.

***

“Can she use the pit?” asked an old man whose house I had been taken to so I could go to the loo.

“Of course I can use the pit,” I said. I am, after all, hardened to the worst kind of African loos. Nothing disgusts me anymore in that department.

‘The Pit’ was terrifying. Wooden planks suspended over a hole six foot long and as many deep. Down below the mass of shit writhed with white maggots. For some reason, I could not stop staring at it, even though I was appalled.

Ghana notes continued

I did not take my digital camera with me to Ghana, because I went with a photographer. Instead, I allowed myself the luxury of taking my granny's 1986 Canon camera, with 2 rolls of Boots film which I had lurking somewhere. Now I realise that my blog will be without colour; the pictures will be posted some time in January, once they're been developed.

*****

Thursday

Whilst sitting, ten of us, around a four foot high pile of golden cocoa pods, I met Mohammed Massahoud, a striking Togoloese man who could speak French. His eyes were delicately and naturally rimmed with a purple smmudge, like make-up. Despite his weathered face and ragged clothes, he was exceptionally handsome.

As he hacked his machete into a pod to bring it into his hands, and then gave it two great whacks, splitting it open and scooping out the seeds and flesh into a basket, we chatted about cocoa farming. Because he and I could speak our own language (‘France-English’, as one of the men in the village called it) I felt like we had something in common. We were able to slip into our own secret world, where things were homely and familiar to me, more so than with the other people who could speak my mother tongue. Maybe it’s because neither of us speak French as our first language, we both take time and understand when the other does not. With English, I hear myself talking as if to a child, berate myself for it, but at the same time know that I must use simple words to be understood.

As the sun got higher in the sky, my ability to sit around this slow-shrinking pile of cocoa pods listening to the delicious thwacking noise of machete-upon-husk dimmed.

“Le soleil va vous tapper,” the Togoloese man said, as if practising his voice scales.

The owner of the farm, a young and incredibly muscular man who said little but did much of the hard labour, ran into the forest and came back minutes later with long slender fronds, 12 foot high. He burrowed their ends into the pile of cocoa and dug others into the ground, building a fortress of shade around me. When he saw that the section of freshly-macheted palm trunk that I was sitting on was damp, he whipped off his dirty string vest, laid a pad of palm leaves down first and then let me have the vest as a cushion. Later on in the morning, he went off into another section of his farm and came back with two bunches of the most wonderful sweet bananas I have ever eaten. This man, it appeared, was rather pleased to have guests on his farm.

The other men helping him on the farm were mostly older, one of them being the recorder, a man with two wives whose job it is to weigh the cocoa and pay the farmers, another being the secretary of the village’s cocoa co-operative. Tomorrow they will go elsewhere to help another farmer, until all the crops are in. On Wednesdays no one goes to the farm. On Tuesday nights, someone will go around the village ringing a bell and announcing what Wednesday’s compulsory communal job will be, and everyone will work on it together.

On the night drive back to the town where we were staying, we passed a small mosque which was lit inside. I saw men in rows kneeling and bowing their heads, and for the second time in the day I felt a kin-ship with something that has nothing to do with my own culture. Senegal has seeped into my life more than I had realised; it has become something comforting to me when I am far away from home.

Ghana notes continued

Wednesday

“There has been a change of plan,” Erika told us this morning as we finished up a breakfast of flabby white toast and red jam.

“The chief of the village where we were going to stay, who also owns the hotel where we were going to sleep, is celebrating his fifth year as chief today. He rang me to say he needs all the rooms in his hotel for the celebration. The only other hotel in the village has an outside toilet. So we can not stay there.”

The prospect of a latrine did not bother me so much. This afternoon, in another latrine in another village, I had to move slowly so as not to disturb the swarms of mosquitoes that lurked on the cool damp walls waiting for the heat to pass, and for a bare bottom to arrive. They were as heavy as flies, and longer, their fine syringes heaving up and down, waiting for a skin feast. I tried to pee harder to be out of there quicker.

Erika, from the cocoa co-operative, took us to another village instead. Through selling Fairtrade cocoa and establishing the Divine Chocolate company, half of which is owned by the co-op and the farmers themselves, they have been paid cash dividends and built a school.

Cecilia, a soft-skinned woman with thick plaits and the sort of friendliness which in Senegal I would just wait to turn into demanding cash, showed us around her village. I told her one of my best friends was called Cecilia. She told me that I reminded her of her sister and promptly gave me her sister’s name, Esswe. On a wooden bench near the co-op weighing scales, Cecilia split open a golden yellow cocoa pod and we shared the fruit inside, a slimy translucent white flesh covering the bitter brown cocoa seed. She could not believe I had never seen cocoa before. Neither could I. What a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Ghana notes

Tuesday

Workmen in tiny Kumasi airport stood on bending planks suspended over high scaffolding frames and sanded the new wooden ceiling. Like parquet flooring, the ceiling shone in herring bone patterns, whereas the floor was tiled in bare ordinary squares. The ceiling at the spotless Precise Lodge was built from the same, proud, wooden slats. I thought about the moulding concrete-and-plaster ceilings of the average hotel in Senegal, and wondered, why.

*****

A two-part article in the daily newspaper expounded on the subject of heartbreak. I left the paper in the seat pocket of the 30-seater plane, and wished I hadn’t.

“Women, I hear,” professed the male journalist, “have more people to talk to about their heartbreak; hair-dressers, taxi drivers, and Aunties.”

It reminds me of the old taxi-driver who gave me a lift in Dakar, a year and a half ago. For some reason, I had told him a secret that had been on my mind for months.

So much more than a taxi service, my friend had said when I told her to whom I had spilled my heart.

*****

Kumasi market is the largest open-air market in west Africa. It is vast, a city of tin roofs with suburbs of yam-sellers within; roads of meat-vendors give way to underwear neighbourhoods; bulk toothpaste streets hustling against the tailors sewing strips of kingly kente cloth.

The yam sellers, all women, were the most gregarious. They pummelled my skin, their ugly bulbous yams sitting by dusty and grey, blobs of pink and green paint to identify their size and price. Piles of dried fish balanced in headstands on tin platters, while their young girl vendors sat behind and called out their worth. A teenage girl with dark blue tattoos on her forehead bustled for a photo, but refused to stay still long enough for me to take it. Again and again, they asked me if Aubrey was my husband or my brother, and when I said, friend, they all laughed and eyed me disbelievingly, like I was telling them a dirty joke.

In one row, a girl sold patchwork cloth, strips of tattered faded fabric in large, thoughtless blocks. She asked me if I wanted to buy it, and I pointed to my own patchwork skirt and told her I could make my own.

“Yes yes, this is fine-fine,” a lady laughed approvingly, crouching on a stool nearby and grabbing at my skirt.

When I told them I lived in Senegal they all laughed again and asked the little girl with the elephantine belly button if she wanted to go home with Auntie Rose to Canada.

Saturday night, and I was on my way to see Omar the Tailor, to pick up my silk sleeping bag for the trip to Ghana. Winding my way through the back of the bus station as darkness fell, I received a phone call from the photographer, Aubrey, in Liberia, who I was to meet on the Slok flight on Sunday morning. Our flight, he said, had been cancelled. The airline said they could get him on a Belleview flight on Tuesday, but apart from that, there was nothing to be done.

Aubrey, once a next-door neighbour from London, and I are meeting delegates from a chocolate company in Ghana on Tuesday. They are taking us out to a remote village to meet cocoa farmers. We have to get to Accra before Tuesday, or we will likely lose the trip. Slok, the Gambia National carrier (this had rung warning bells in my ears), are famously unreliable, cancelling flights five minutes before take-off and forgetting to stop in the cities along the way, leaving passengers for Monrovia stranded in Freetown, with no way of returning.

“These planes,” said Vijay, my young Indian travel agent, “are like buses. They should not be going in the air.”

While Omar finished up my bag, the machines in the atelier rattling away, I called Vijay and asked him if he knew anything about it. He said he would ring Slok and call me back. Five minutes later, as I tried to explain to Omar what The Independent magazine is and why it matters if I don’t leave for Accra on Sunday, Vijay rang me back to say he had rung Slok in Dakar, who knew nothing about the cancellations and were still selling tickets, who had rung Banjul to discover that all planes have been grounded for a month. “The planes,” explained Vijay, “are past their expiration date. Some planes can stay for one hundred and twenty five years, some for one hundred and fifty.”

“And Slok planes,” I asked, intrigued to know how old Vijay thought they were, “how old are they?”

“Maybe two hundred years. Yes. They should not be going in the air.”

“What am I going to do?” I wanted to know.

“I will get you to Accra tomorrow madam, please do not worry. I will call you back.”

Ten minutes later, with Omar sitting beneath the glow of the atelier light in wonder at this back and forth of text messages to Liberia (Aubrey trying to get on a UN flight), the chocolate company in London, and various friends who have all flown Slok and who all have their own techniques as to how to deal with the inevitable cancellations, Vijay rang me back to tell me the good news.

“I get you on a flight to Abidjan and then you will stay in transit to Accra. It is two hundred thousand francs more. And I must issue the ticket tonight or else you will lose it.”

I hadn’t yet heard from the chocolate company to know if I should pay the extra money. “How late can you issue the ticket,” I asked him, “before we lose it?”

“Madam, I do not go to the night club, I am here with my laptop. If you call me at twelve or one o clock in the morning I will issue the ticket. Please do not worry about this.”

Promising to call him back, I sat down with Omar and we decided to make a scarf out of the remaining strip of silk. It was nine o clock before we finished, and Omar walked me home.

“It is easy for you to create things,” Omar said, and I felt pleased. Senegalese do not give compliments that often. “You can see nice things quickly.”

This morning, I went out to get money for the ticket. Outside the cash machine, boys hung around selling Herald Tribunes and top-up phone cards.

“Do you have a card for twenty-five thousand?” I asked a young boy who held a strip of the orange and black cards, flapping them in my face.

“No,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Buy ten thousand.”

I ignored him and crossed the road, but heard a loud hissing, turning into, “oh-ho”, from behind me. The same boy was pushing his friend towards me, his friend holding out a card for 25,000 francs. I bought one, and the two boys slunk back to their post outside the cash machine.

*****

Vijay’s office overlooks the smelliest place in Dakar. One day, when they have finished digging the tunnel that will turn the road into a veritable super highway, of exactly the same size as it was before, it will be well positioned. But for now, the office is constantly covered in dust, the air outside is indigestible because pits of raw sewage lie festering and open, and the men who sit about like spare parts beside the road works, waiting for something exciting to happen, hiss and shout, following you with waving hands if you try to make your way to the office.

“Where are you going?” they demand aggressively, as you climb over random pieces of metal and rocks to get to the front door. “What is your business here?”

It doesn’t occur to them that I may in fact be going to the row of shops overlooking the roadworks, and not about to climb down into the works themselves. They must think toubabs are really stupid. Or perhaps they have nothing better to do.

Now I ignore them and walk on. Let them follow me, if they want.

Vijay is inside the office, his motorbike also parked inside. He has opened up the agency for me, on a Sunday morning.

Quickly, he prints me out my ticket. He asks me if I am with Reuters or Associated Press.

“Neither,” I say, and tell him who I work for.

“So that means when Kenya Airways crashes you have to go to Doula and things like that?”

“Um, not exactly, but that kind of thing, yes,” I say, unsure.

“Okay well have a good journey anyway,” he laughs.

*****

‘First time in Africa!’ exclaims the board in the smoky hotel lobby. ‘Broadband internet in the rooms!’

I telephone the front desk to ask for the password for the internet router.

“Twelve dollars for twenty four hours,” drawls the man on the other end of the phone, the cable of which I have to hold in place for a clear line.

*****

At the airport, my hotel bus hasn’t arrived. I go to the hotel information desk and ask the young man if he can help me.

“Do you have a reservation? Can I see your proof of confirmation please?”

I tell him I have no proof that anyone confirmed my booking, although I’m sure someone did, but could he call the hotel anyway and ask them to come and pick me up.

“I can give you the number of the hotel, but I can not call them for you unless I can see your proof of confirmation,” he says. I can not bear to continue this conversation and take a taxi.

Dakar is going through sudden gentrification. Over the last year or so, shiny night spots and flash restaurants have been sprouting up along the souless road to the airport, and I was recently refused entry into one of them because I was wearing flip-flops. I am not the kind of clientelle these places are hoping to attract.

Closer to home, in the centre of town, the government has started a massive cleaning-up-the-streets programme which means that the lepers who live on one corner of my road, and the wheelchair-bound women who live on the other side, have suddenly disappeared. Fruit sellers, the Burkinabe furniture makers, the peanut women, the boys selling phone top-up cards- they have almost all gone. The streets are empty, clean, and on odd corners lie piles of wood where make-shift shops have been dismantled and turned into firewood.

It has been remarkably quick. Armed soldiers came down and literally swept the lepers from their homes the night before last, and in the morning, there was nothing to be seen of them.

This afternoon I went looking for fruit. I could not find any. I couldn't bear to go to the corner where I buy my vegetables for fear that the lady, who calls herself my Senegalese mother and always sends me away with a squash for free, had been swept away too. On my way back home, I saw the furniture weaver tucked away on the corner of the road where he used to have his business. I asked him about it.

"Well, they didn't move us on but they were moving everyone else so we decided to hide in that derelict building," he pointed to a block of half- flats, "until it all passed."

We both remembered that this kind of attempt to get street traders off the streets had happened some years ago and after a couple of weeks, it all went back to normal, all was forgotten.

Turning the corner, I saw one of the handless lepers, an old man in a wooly bobble-hat, leaning up against a wall. Infront of him were two kids, about 7 years old, begging for food. The leper was dividing up a small piece of stale baguette and putting pieces into the kids's begging bowls.

There is something intrinsically wrong about enjoying tender rolls of smoked salmon, and canapes of avacado and succulent beef on the lawn of an African presidency. It is the second time in a week I have eaten fabulous food at the expense of the Senegalese state. Perhaps what feels wrong is how pleasant it is. Or how gullible the average man on the street seems when I step outside. I know it's nothing in comparison to the extraordinary extravagance of some of Africa's dictators long since gone, but I don't know how to comfortably be a part of it anyway.

The Harmattan, the wind that blows Saharan sand through every crack of the house and covers clothes, skin, hair, fridges and floors with dust, has arrived about two months early. In celebration, or preparation, I have fitted out my flat with house slippers. I searched high and low, and came across these lovely creatures.



Visitors, always welcome (but also encouraged out of habit to remive their shoes), will be provided with a pair of Twin Tower house-slippers on arrival to protect their feet from the dust.

In other news, I have been lusting after a pair of flip-flops, for the street, which are not ugly and do not bear the image of buildings or Osama Bin Laden beards. If anyone wants to send me some, or give me some for Christmas, I will be entirely grateful.

Now I need some advice. I want to make labels to sew into the patchwork things I make with Omar the tailor. What's a good name for us? I had previously thought of The Senegalese Patchwork Co-operative, and today thought of Chapa-chapa which is what they call patchwork in Guinea Bissau. Any ideas, anyone?

This evening I took a taxi from the beach back to my home in town. The driver spoke no French and looked barely old enough to be driving a car. I noticed he beeped his horn rather a lot, but said nothing. I then noticed, to my horror, that he drove like a manic and that his car could barely take the turns he was insiting on speeding around to overtake another car in the face of oncoming traffic. He beeped his horn some more and the driver of the car we were overtaking at the time made an angry hand gesture as we went by. I asked the boy why he used the horn so much.

"Me!" he shouted above the din of his rustbucket slamming over potholes. "Me, no", he went on, pointing at the horn at the same moment that it beeped, all of its own accord. "Connection," he went on.

I got it. The connection was dodgy and the horn was beeping on its own. But why did he have to drive so dangerously? I threatened to get out of the taxi if he didn't slow down, and he eventually did.

When he dropped me at my place and handed me the change, he said politely,

"Thankyou, Mama."

Labah Soseh, a well-known musician from the Gambia who played old-school Cuban salsa, sadly died recently and there were various obituaries in the papers which remembered his rich musical career and life. I nearly saw him perform once, in a small popular bar in Ziguinchor, where I used to live.

It was late on a Saturday night, and I went along to see what was happening at the bar. At one end of the dark room, past crowded tables with their plastic place-mats, instruments were set up but no one playing them. The manager, a smart-looking lady with a fierce voice that she was never afraid to use when one of her hired musicians misbehaved or turned up late, was standing in the corner bellowing. Some men were standing around giggling. I tried to follow the conversations to find out what was going on, and Tapha translated for me.

The musician, by this time in his seventies, had arrived to play his set, and a large audience had turned out to see him play. He insisted that the manager of the bar pay him before he start, which she did, so he took the money and started to sing. Half way through the gig, he apparently took a break and went to his nearby home with one of the bar's many prostitutes, using the money he had been paid for this evening's work. He then returned twenty minutes later and the manager was horrified to see that he had changed out of his smart outfit and shiny shoes and was now wearing a pair of flip-flops on his feet. She fired him on the spot. One has to ask who is the loser in all of this.

Sorry to drag my blog down to the level of a tv soap but I just finished watching every episode of Sex and the City ever made, or at least, it felt like it. So Carrie moves to a foreign country where she can't understand anyone and she doesn't have any friends. She hates it and her friends tell her to come back home. She makes tearful phone calls home from payphones and knows she made a big mistake, but doesn't know how to put it right without looking silly. Hmm, interesting.

Midnight. Stepping onto the ragged pavement outside a bar, I hissed at a passing taxi and it shuddered to a halt.

"I'm going to town. How much?" I asked the middle aged driver, who was wearing a worn white boubou and a blue wooly hat.

"Mil cinq cents," he said. "Is that OK?" He looked at me through the open passenger-side window.

"One thousand three hundred," I offered, knowing that with the change I had in my purse, that was the easiest amount.

Living in Senegal is tiring, and demanding. But when people ask me how it's tiring, I can't quite think of why. When you climb in a taxi in Dakar, not only do you have to bargain a price and deal with an irrate driver who knows you are rich from the colour of your skin and so assumes you are happy to pay more, but you must also instinctively know what's in your purse in the way of change. You don't have time to look and drivers may not have small notes or coins. If you end up at your destination and find out that you don't have the right money, then you just have to accept to pay more, or fight to pay less.

As the car rattled off along the dark road, he asked if I had the three hundred in change. He switched on a dim light so I could check, and I discovered that I was 10 francs (about one pence) off the right amount.

"No problem," he said sweetly. "Even if you were twenty five francs down, I'd let it go. I am tolerant." Switching the light off, he drove on.

We drove through the rough Medina neighbourhood, past girls sitting on the steps of a house while the boys made tea on a small charcoal burner, past fruit sellers with carts of plasticy apples and perfect plantation bananas. Everything seemed bright to me, shapes sharper, shadows more intriguing. Life feels intense again, and I feel more alive than I have in months. I have no idea why.

I spent my first month in Senegal, seven whole years ago, chasing Baaba Maal around the country and never, ever, meeting him. I know some of his musicians, family and friends, but seven years later, I have had more near misses with this Senegalese hero of mine, than I can now count.

Just as I consider that my life in Senegal may actually, one day, come to an end, I am starting to realise one of my few remaining Senegal dreams. To meet, interview and get to know, in some small way, this person who has inspired me through seven years of life in Africa, and life as a music journalist. I may finally be going to meet Baaba Maal.

On this Sunday afternoon, that prospect feels very, very good indeed.

Walking home from the pool, I happened on a song on my iPod which took me back to a feeling I had forgotten. Frank Sinatra, from an album I listened to when I was missing someone so much I thought I would just one day, simply cease being.

I walked through the darkening streets, listening, and passed the small Fula shop where I buy my gas. In a tall white building up above, I saw what I thought was a statue head posing in the window frame. It was a young black woman, a cloth covering her head as she gazed out the kitchen window. Framed in the adjacent window was her boss, watching the same evening scene, but from the heavily decorated living room window. Neither knew the other was there.

The holiday weekend. Everyone runs out to buy cloth. These remind me of women in burqas trapped behind bars.

I go into an office furniture shop to buy a swivel chair. I choose it, under the blank glare of a bored shop assistant, and go to the cash desk to pay.

I notice three credit card machines at the till.

"Oh!" I say, excited. "I can pay with a card?"

The assistant sucks her teeth at me. She half-closes her eyes to show that she is displeased. I have already said I will pay by cash and to change now would require her replacing a word on my bill with another.

"We prefer cash," she says, crawling over the words, every syllable a tremendous effort.

"I prefer to pay with a card," I say. I am, after all, the customer, I think, mistakenly.

She turns her head to the lady at the till, her eyes lingering over me as if she wishes me a painful death.

"The card machine doesn't work," says the lady behind the till.

There. That sorted that one out. Both ladies smile at me, unkindly.

I always though it an unkind stereotype that African women give birth and then carry on with their work.

This afternoon, I was chatting with M., the delightful woman who twice a week comes by, cleans my house and takes me from my solitary freelance hell. We talked about her impending birth.

"Aren't you tired yet,?" I asked her as she mopped the floors infront of me. I was sitting on the sofa fanning myself with a wicker fan, sweat running down my arms.

"No," M. giggled, herself sweating in the extraordinary heat.

"When I was pregant with my other son, I worked until nine months. On the Tuesday, I went to work and made breakfast for my boss. I cleaned the house as usual. Then I made the lunch." Still mopping the floors, every now and then whipping a cloth out of her housecoat andd giving something a polish, she laughed as she remembered the story.

"I carried on making the lunch until I couldn't go on. I called my boss and he took me to the hospital. At one pm, I gave birth to Mark."

Dakar is quite literally, on fire.

"A-ou?", the man in the scruffy blue security uniform barked at me as I tried to walk through the British Airways office door.

"A-ou?" I asked, incredulous "What does 'a-ou' mean?"

"Foi djem?" he replied, asking me in Wolof where I was going.

I think what you wanted to say was, 'Madam, can I help you?'. But I resisted the urge to say to this him, because he wouldn't get the irony.

Every building, car parking space and square inch of land in Dakar has a guard, from a man officially employed by a security company to stand with a baton infront of the office door, to a young boy who hangs out waiting for someone to park his car so he can earn some money looking after it. Even though these people belong to one of the friendliest populations on earth, once they get a cap and a uniform, they become gruff, mistrusting and often downright rude.

"Is there a press conference today?" I ask the guard at the ministry, knowing full well that there is but that I have not been invited.

"The press is here, yes," he says, questioningly, looking me up and down with a doubtful glare.

"Can I come in then?" I say, moving to get my press card from my bag.

" Well who are you?!" he shouts, turning to face me and drawing his large frame up to what feels like double my size.

"I'm press..." I say, feeling small.

The guard turns my card over and inspects it for a long time. "OK, go in," he conceeds, disappointed.

I go into the salle de presse and the air conditioning is on so high that the air is icy. The room, layered with red velvet curtains and stuffed full of highly polished wooden furniture, is also stuffed full of journalists. The ministers have not arrived yet, and when they do it is not the minister who I had expected to be there. A mis-print in the announcement in the paper means I was expecting someone from another country.

At the prime minister's office, the guards are more friendly. There are many more of them, perhaps giving them less chance to play the policeman.

I arrive at the impressively white building and am met by a policeman, a real one, wearing dark glasses and high leather boots. He is standing in full sun and I want to move into the shade but am afraid to move past the man, who no doubt carries a gun somewhere on that belt, in case he should think I was making a run for the prime minister himself.

I tell him I have a meeting with Mr. D. He almost smiles and waves me towards a guard in a cabin, just inside the front door.
Beside the guard's cabin is a suitcase which is half-covered in the celephane they use at airports. If it is half wrapped or half unwrapped I am not sure.

The second guard is polite. He adresses me as 'Vous' and 'Madam'. He asks my name. I tell him, but he struggles, as everyone does in this country, with the pronunciation. Eventually we decide on 'Kelton', which everyone can say. He shows me into a room, jammed full of sofas, too many for the space, and closes the heavy louvered doors, waving his hand infront of the air conditioner to check it is working. A moment later he comes back and gets a bag out of the gray cupboard wedged in the corner of the room. He puts something away in the bag, slides it back into place, and has to rearrange the cupboard door which has fallen off in the process.

"Yes, yes, hang on..." rustling amongst papers, lifting up files and discovering the telephone underneath.

"Yes, somewhere here I have a business card," says the ministerial press attache, who knows as well as I do that no such card exists.

"Oh," he looks at me with charmingly forlorn eyes, turning his back on the desk. "C'est fini."

This one is different. He had a card, which he sat down underneath the image of Jesus to write upon, and gave me his home phone number and postal address too.

It is the end of a long week, long because the heat is excrutiating, and because I can't seem to motivate myself to work. Nothing much is happening in the news; I have never known it this quiet. It is probably the quiet before the storm, or the fact that during Ramadan and The Heat, which have come together this year, no one can do anything of any use.

But on Fridays, a certain Central Bank in the region issues its treasury bill results. They have not been posted on the website so I opened my contacts spreadsheet and quickly picked off a number next to the name M.

"Hello M!" I positively bellowed down the phone. "This is Rose in Dakar!"

"Ah! Hello Rose," said the voice at the other end, which brought back memories of deep laughs and large bellies. "I thought you had abandoned me! I'm so happy to hear your voice."

We chatted a little about the weather and Ramadan and I told him I was joining my friends to break the fast with them this evening.

"And have you seen your friend, the governor, yet?" M. asked.

I was silent. Why was the treasury bill man asking me about the governor of another regional bank, who for six months I have been trying in interview, with no success?

Unless I wasn't talking to that M. I was infact talking to the other M. The Governor himself. They share the same name.

Once I realised that I had rung the mobile phone of the Governor by mistake, my face went cold and my hands, gripping the telephone receiver, went clammy. How could I have rung him and been so informal and friendly? He must think me very rude.

"No," I stammered. "I haven't been able to get him yet. His press people tell me he is very busy and can't possibly see me."

"Well," said M. incredulously, annoyed. "I will ring him myself and tell him he must see you. I know he would be delighted to meet with you if only he knew about you."

"Well thanks!" I had recovered by then, realising that west Africans love to be friendly and ring eachother up for no reason other than to say hi. People probably don't just ring up the Governor of the Central Bank for no reason, but then, we had shared tea and McVities Digestives in his office and got along just fine. We are friends now.

In Senegal during the holy month of Ramadan everything shuts down. The man on the corner who usually sells me newspapers is rarely there at 8 as he usually is, and there is a lot less traffic than usual. Friends who have never been grumpy start being short with me and I can walk all the way through Sandaga market without anyone trying to sell me phone credit. Clubs are empty or shut; those who do go out do so discretely.

On Saturday night, I went with two friends visiting from London to see Souleyman Faye play, forgetting it was Ramadan and the night was likely to be a quiet one. When we go to the bar, it was empty save for Souleymane and two band members sitting in a dark corner. Undeterred, I went over to announce our arrival. He humoured me, and got up to start the gig. A bass guitar, Souleyman on the lead, and Aziz, his faithful sabar drum player.



Even though there were only a handful of people in the audience, or perhaps because there were only a few people there, he gave it everything. Always introducing the song with some amusing anecdote in French or Wolof, he had the audience laughing before starting on a heart-breaking Wolof version of ‘ne me quitte pas’ or a rocking tale of the spirits of Dakar. He has an extraordinary voice, one which can make you forget there are only three people on stage when there should be seven and which can make you feel you are alone in the room with just the music, sung for you.

His final song launched mid-way into a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s get it on’. He gave it a go, and it could have gone so badly wrong, but it totally worked.

www.myspace.com/souleymanfaye

*****

Minding my own business on Saturday, I noticed that what I thought was an ant bite on my leg had grown more swollen and itchy in the three days I had had it. On closer inspection, I noticed a black spot. On prodding with a needle, I had hooked a black tumba worm out of my leg.

These nasty little creatures come about when the fly lays an egg on wet sand or clothes hanging out to dry. You sit on the sand, or put the clothes on, and the larvae burrows into your skin. The egg hatches and a worm grows. Eventually, I imagine (mine never got the chance), it becomes a fly, and the whole process begins again. I’ve never heard of these worms in Senegal; it is much too tame here. But since regaling my friends with my war story, I’ve discovered that loads of people have had them, or know people who have, and they’re really rather common garden. What a disappointment.

It took a few months, during which I could not publish photos of the project in progress because it was a surprise for my friends who were getting married, but my second bedspread is finished and here's a picture to prove it.



The trouble is, it's so much nicer than my own. But Sim and Vicky are the nicest couple around so it's fitting. I only hope they don't like it so I can keep it for myself.

I'm back in Dakar now, and strangely, happy to be home. My last trip to London made me realise that for better or for worse, Dakar is my home now and I feel better about it for having faced up to the fact. It's been raining and at three this morning I lay in bed watching a storm through the balcony doors. My baobab tree, which for one year has looked like it's had a bad case of syphilis, now has three new branches after I went at it with a scalpel. It has more leaves now than it ever did and I hope one day it will flower again.

Talking of trees, the frangipani tree is now too heavy to stand up under its own weight.



I guess that's why they're always bent over.

While I was away, some idiot came along and dumped a truck full of sand on our garden.



I doubt the plants will survive living under 6 feet of sand for the next month, and I further doubt, as Now optimistically believes will happen, that anyone will come along and move it.

To quote my friend, "Everyone talks about solidarity, but there's no consideration".

It's Ramadan here so I went along at 7pm to break the fast with Now. I'm obviously not fasting, but celebrated with him anyway. It was lovely to be in the damp heat, sitting on the shop floor, talking about the neighbours and laughing about how I will never get used to the amount of times I must hear "You've got fat Rose!" when I come back from England. I know I've got fat you lot, but shut it anyway.

And as if that wasn't a nice enough home-coming, the embassy has just rung to tell me my passport has arrived.

An excellent part of the summer. Interviewing Toumast at Womad. Nice times.

The ferry ride from Oban to the Isle of Mull is one of my favourite journeys on earth. The boat pulls out of the small port and makes its way past green islets and lighthouses on rocky outcrops, and then out into the open sea. From there you are really in the western isles, an isolated and at times desolate place where the fog can be both dark and beautiful, sometimes obscuring what's infront of you, sometimes parting to let you in.

The Caledonian McBrayne ferry is the only way to get there. It's a boat that everyone complains about, and it's one of my earliest memories.

"It always smells like chicken curry on that boat," said the jolly fiddle player of Lau, a band I went to see perform on the Uxbridge Road this week. He had just come off stage having played a gorgeous ode to that ferry journey, chicken curry and all.

"But you can get a bacon butty any time of day," I said, remembering fondly my brother taking me down to the ship's cafeteria to buy the greasy buns that my mother would never have let us have at any other time.

Lau is a group of three guys from England and Scotland. Their concert was every bit as wonderful as their album. I wondered if they would be able to replicate the dramatically changing rhythms and melodies on stage, and they did, with humour and energy.

You can listen to one of their tracks here.

I feel as foreign now in the neighbourhood I grew up in than I do in downtown Dakar. Yesterday I went shopping on the Northcote Road, felt sheepish as I bought just a hundred grams of expensive cheese while the mothers beside me bought huge chunks and roasted garlic cloves in oil as well. Felt pushed out of a cafe when young boys in mullets soon to go back to school jostled for the free polos at the counter and nagged at their older, tired-looking mothers. Young teenage girls with messy hair-dos who do lunch; don't get me started on the push chairs.

Where do these people come from, and where are the people like me?

Sierra Leone notes continued

Monday

Torrential, torrential rain. I have lost my umbrella and went out wearing a sun dress.



Taking shelter at a tailor shop, Abou Bacchari Bah and his troop of tailors welcomed me in, found me a wooden chair with a broken seat-back, and told me to hold on until the “river go dry-dry”.



I watched them make my mum a shirt out of a red fabric I bought at the market, ironing the folds with a metal iron filled with hot coals, sending a boy out into the rain to buy ‘stiffening’ to starch the collar with, talking about Pita, the town in Guinea where all their fathers come from and which I know too, from travels last year.



Sitting with so many Fulas, it was like being back in Senegal with Now and the gang. They were delighted with me taking photos of them. Since they have a street address, I can actually send the photos, and this time, I will.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Sunday

When I got back to town, the first thing I had to do was to check my emails, read the news, and update my blog. I went up to the hotel where I spent last week, which has wireless internet, and ordered some coffee. The manager was happy to see me and asked me all about my trip.

The obese owner of the hotel, a man who is rumoured to be funding the election campaign of one of the favourite candidates, was sitting at a table next to me. After half an hour I noticed my internet connection had gone so I went over to the reception to ask if there was a problem with the router.

“We have changed the password,” said the large lady in the silken boubou at the desk who I had not seen before. I guessed she was the owner’s wife. She glared at me, managed not to suck her teeth, and went back to looking at her computer screen. I didn’t move, because I thought she was going to give me the new password. A few moments later, she looked up at me and said, “Yes?” and in total disbelief I realised that they had changed the password to stop me from using it.

“It is only for guests,” said the lady, charmed with herself.

“But I was a guest here for a week,” I protested, “and I am having a drink.” I started to burn with embarrassment as one by one the entire staff of the hotel gathered around.

“Yes, well, you are not a guest now,” she said and looked back at her computer. The manager of the hotel, my friend, stared at his hands as if they would save him from this awful situation, and I walked away feeling utterly humiliated.

Luckily, I had already found a great guesthouse by then, run by a magical lady who has built a guesthouse in her retirement. By her own admission, it is a Sierra Leonean Faulty Towers, though perhaps she did not realise that this drew images of total disarray and fundamental breakdown. The first night, I had a room which backed onto the generator so that I spent the night with my head pounding to the sound of an enormous motor. The next morning I asked to be moved and was given a very nice room next door in which all seemed well.

Until I took a shower, and realised that I was getting terrible electric shocks from everything that I touched, including the bar of soap. The shower tray must have been alive with current.

Living in Senegal, my electric shock threshold is much higher than it was when I lived in a place with safe electrics, but I did have images of being fried alive in the bath and was finally afraid to even go into the bathroom.

It turned out that the plug on the air-con unit had melted and the wires inside were touching. The whole room was a death waiting to happen. While I had dinner, the jolly staff brought me four candles while the electrician, called out on a rainy night, turned off the power and fixed the problem.

Tonight I was feeling, well, hungover and tired. My friend and I had been on a long mission to the beach for lunch in which we had to swim across a crocodile-infested (I suspect) lagoon with a ripping current to get to the actual, gorgeous, beach. We were tired. I got home to find there was no water.

Emerging into the bar and pretty restaurant, I was met by the four happy staff who work there who have taken to me like their sister. They call me Aunty when I still do not know their names. Seeing I was in need, they brought me a cold Star Beer, nudged me into a comfy arm chair and opened the wooden chest which had a tiny little TV inside.

They turned on the Africa Magic channel and together- me in the arm chair and the waiters standing around chuckling and saying aa-ha! when anyone did anything they agreed with-we watched a three hour Nigerian feature film, the moral of which appeared to be that women who look for rich husbands end up alone, and that one should never invite the mother-in-law to stay. The script was full of beautiful African English, much teeth-sucking, and so much irony and greek chorus drama, that by the end we were all so involved that the poor customers in the restaurant practically had to go and cook their own food. It was just like being at home.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Thursday

This afternoon, Moustapha came to pick me up. I was glad to get out of such isolation, the wind and the rain falling on my lonely little house eventually got the better of me. We drove along the foot of forested hills and across small rivers with grand names like Macdonald Brige, and Moustapha explained how the British had named everything, even this road, which to me was not much of what I would call a ‘road’. The Penninsular Road, he said.

With the coast to our right, the mountains to our left and the tumbling rivers falling away below us, it was a ripe moment for feeling that all was right with the world. Moustapha put a CD into the car radio and started to sing along passionately to Enrique Iglesias’ ‘Hero’, his gravelly voice scratching through the octaves as I hummed alongside.



Just before we arrived in Freetown, we stopped at a village to buy charcoal for Moustapha’s family. Freestanding on the road’s verge were sacks of the stuff, topped off with palm leaves to protect them from the rain. A muscular man came out to greet us, his wife staying on the porch of the house, cobbled together with wood and metal strips, gathering long green cassava leaves into bundles.

As Moustapha and the father went about the business of arguing over the price, grandmother brought out a little girl to greet me. When the girl saw what it was granny wanted her to do, say hello to a scary white thing, she started bawling, streams of tears pouring down her face as she dug her heels into the red rocky earth and screamed even louder. I beckoned, in as friendly a manner as I could, for her to come over but she cried even more, and before long the whole family- aside the mother who was still bundling up leaves- had come to watch the hilarious spectacle of the poor little girl being dragged towards something really frightening.

Eventually I gave up and we got back in the car. Granny asked if I didn’t have something for the little girl and Moustapha said in his usual abrupt way that I could give 2,000 leones if I had it. I handed over a brown damp note and the little girl steeled herself to take it from me. Everyone clapped, and we drove away.

“She no see white man before,” said Moustapha, happy with his three bags of coal. “She think you monster.” We drove on.

Sierra Leone notes continued

Wednesday

Nesta wears a red t-shirt saying “Be nice or you’re fired”. He is the captain of the canoe, I am told, when I ask how I can cross the river that splits our beach in two. He takes me down the sandy shore of the river, to the point where it meets the sea, and we climb into a narrow dug-out canoe. He has a lovely smile.



Nesta says he is there until dark, and I pay him 1,000 leones to take me the twenty metres across the river. When I want to come back, he says, I should wave my umbrella from the other side and he will come over and get me.

Walking along the beach under ominous skies, a little boy comes running from a dilapidated building where his mother is winding up rope into a tight green knot.

“You want to see live crocodile?” he asks me, beside himself with excitement. How could I refuse?

This little boy, taking me by the hand, leads me over to the back of his house where his father has trapped four crocodiles. Two more kids join the first, the little girl holding my hand.

The father comes along and insists on opening the tiny cage where the four toothy reptiles are penned up, adding at the last minute that they haven't been fed for four days as he has no money for fish.



“You snap-snap them,” he insists, and the mother, teeth missing, laughs and says something along the lines of, the white man is afraid. Too right, I think. Someone’s going to get snap-snapped in all of this.

Sierra Leone notes

Arriving at the beach, I find I am the only guest. I don’t know why this fact surprises me; I tend to almost always be the only guest when I travel to these places, and more often than not, wish it weren’t so. Still, when other people do turn up, I mostly find their presence annoying.

My bungalow, unimaginative concrete and tin roof, is on the beach. The sea is grey and approaching angry, I wouldn’t swim in it as it is, and the ten young men who appeared when I made my way down a rocky dirt track seemed unwelcoming at first.

But as we chatted on the beach- someone was cleaning a room for me- I realised they are just reserved. I am not used to not being a total hit right from the start, but it’s nice this way.

I have a bathroom in my bungalow, but no water. When I decide to go and see if I can have a bucket of water, I hear a lot of giggling and peep out of my window at the back of the house to see a string of teenage boys at various stages up a ladder, one standing at the top pouring water into a large black water tower ('Donated by Mobil, December 2002'). Realising that they are filling the water tower by hand, the bucket being passed from the ground right up the ladder to the top, and that they are doing it just for me, I go out to tell them I am happy with a bucket and a cup.

The boys all turn when they hear me coming, and scramble down the ladder and gather in a hut nearby, as if they had been there all along. When I tell Francis, the slightly older manager-type person, that I don’t mind having my water in a bucket, he looks disappointed and tells me that he wants to get the water tower filled so that when my friend comes tomorrow, we will have running water.

Oh yes, my mythical friend. The one that was meant to be arriving tomorrow, whose existence would serve as a warning to those men who may have wanted to kill me in the night, that they would be found out if they did something bad to me. And here they are, filling up a giant water tower by hand so that I can flush my toilet. Shame.

*****


Moustapha Savage is my taxi man. He tells me he doesn’t want to drive me to this beach because the road is bad. We drive to another beach, where I don’t want to be, and I make him ask a young guy in the village what the road is like further down the coast. Fine, he says, just go slowly-slowly.

The road is in fact better. Some rocky passes, but even gravel in some places, as opposed to the mud we have been sliding along in from Freetown. The whole journey of fifteen kilometres takes three hours.

When we arrive at the deserted beach guesthouse, and I am confronted by too many men, but I decide to stay anyway because where else would I go?, I tell Moustapha he can leave me and go back to Freetown.

“No, I wait till you settle,” he says, his bony face smiling as best it can, wide eyes white under a navy cap.

Moustapha wishes the British would come back and take over Sierra Leone. Maybe then the roads would be better.

The first day off work, we headed into the hills to a village called Charlotte where there is a magnificent waterfall cascading down the rocks near the village. We met a 24 year old man called Akim, a farmer, who led us through the village and into the forest, collecting young boys along the way. At the waterfall, the boys dived off the rocks while I looked cautiously on. But I did have a go too. And it was wonderful.



Akim's village was attacked by rebels in the early 1990s. He fled to the bush with his family and the village was overtaken by ECOMOG forces who fought back the rebels. He lived seven years in the forest surviving, he said, on apples and water.

Now he has a garden and grows salad, tomatoes and runner beans. HIs mum takes them to the town to sell. The village has 65 people in it, and seems a peacfeul haven. Hard, and sad, to imagine a war being fought there.

chicken chop-chop

Rose and Dan go to a restaurant. It is late at night.

They peruse the menus.

Rose: "What is the 'chicken random' please?"

Waitress: "Is chicken chop-chop."

Rose: "And what does it come with?"

Waitress: "Huh?"

Rose: "What with?"

Waitress: "A knife."

Dan: "But how is the chicken"

Waitress: "Is dead."

Rose falls below the table in hysterical giggling.

Sierra Leoneans went to the polls today. That was how my story started anyway. I was up and out by 7, when voting should have started, but in the school where the Vice President was going to vote, ballot papers still hadn't arrived at 10am. Tempers were frayed.



The VP did arrive, and people in the queues told him, get to the back of the queue, we want vote. So he went away again.



Eventually, people started to get their votes in, often queuing in the rain standing in muddy fields for hours at a time with probably very little warm food to keep them warm. Whoever says Sierra Leoneans are "slow in their march to democracy" is wrong. Sierra Leoneans, just like the Africans in the four other countries I have reported on elections in, are much more politically engaged than I am, for example. It just isn't always the man on the street who gets heard when he talks.



At lunch time, we decided to go out of the city to a place called Waterloo, where all we did pretty much was visit the Sata de Yum restaurant and eat a plate of acheke: pounded cassava with chicken, potatoes, egg, salad, cold baked beans, tomato ketchup and mayonnaise all in one bowl. Delicious! I just googled acheke and was told:

"Acheke is really significant in Sierra Leone and to its culture. It is important because it strengthens an individual and keeps one going for a long time, without getting hungry."



I ate 8 hours ago. I am still not hungry.

Next to the restaurant was the USA Big Time hair salon, a wooden chair in a concrete room with a tin roof where a young girl was being subjected to a hair cut by a man with a pair of large paper scissors. Wearing a pinny, he first hacked off her hair literally to within an inch of its life, then he used a razor blade, cleverly slotted against a comb so that the teeth of the comb picked up the hair and then the blade sliced it off, to shave off the rest. He offered to do mine. I declined.

On the way home we stopped for petrol. Unremarkable, I know, except...



It was such a great petrol station. The young pump attendant pumped a handle so that the petrol rushed into a glass chamber which could hold a gallon, and then the pump went into the tank and it all gushed out. Magic.

Views of Freetown

24 hours non-stop of gushing, biting, slicing rain. But this is a city of umbrella-lurkers, men who run out with large picnic umrellas and escort you through the torrents to where you want to go.

Today I had success at one of the ministries. I was preparing myself, had long ago steeled myself, for the shaking of the head and the "he'll call you" followed by phone silence that I was expecting to receive. I have never got a minister to talk in Senegal, why should it be any different here?

Indeed, yesterday, I was met with red tape. "If he wants to see you, he'll give you a ring," said one secratary, and then scowled as I tried to tell her why it was good for him to talk to me. She scowled me out of the office, making sure I would never come back.

But this morning I was lucky. I found the public relations man, surrounded by the obligatory newspapers and a poster of Jesus.

He suggested we go up to the fourth floor and see the minster himself. I was ready for the scowling and the intense feeling of failure as I yet again don't manage to get any information, but when I arrived in the large, softly furnised yellowing room, I was shown straight in to see the minister.

He sat, big belly almost like another person in the room, at his desk and seemed delighted to see me. He was eating a muffin, told me that his wife had told him in bed this morning that he was getting fat, and then said he was sorry not to be able to offer me tea, but he had taken his tea cups home incase he was no longer minister come Monday morning.

I asked if we could meet to do an interview.

"Yes! Right now!" he shouted, and then laughed. "Ah ha! I have caught you on the wrong foot."

About an hour into the interview, which was immensely entertaining, five of his ministry came into the room.

"Gentlemen," he boomed. "There are five of you here including the director. Is something the matter?"

They looked nervous. Clearly there was, but they weren't going to announce it infront of me.

"Um, Sir, it's about that contract," said one of the group.

"Well get me my lawyer then, we need her here!" he contined to bellow, the heavy wooden furniture seeming to rumble in the wake of his voice. "And come back later! I am doing an interview."

When we finished the interview, he studied my business card and saw the photo on the back.

"You will give this to me for free?" he asked, delighted when I said yes.

"And you are a photographer? then you must take my photo please."

I happened to have my camera in my bag and, in total disbelief that a minister was asking me to photograph him, I took a photo, first of him looking serious and ministerial, and then, when I asked him why he didn't smile, of him roaring, positively quaking, with mirth.

In all the time i have traipsed in and out of ministerial offices and sat in the boxy, disorganised rooms of so-called public relations people who can't tell their telephone from their tea cup, this is the first time I could even imagine doing something like taking a photo. When I get home I will print them as a reminder of how miracles do happen.

My first impression of Sierra Leoneans is how much they laugh. This is one of the perverse stereotypes of Africa, that people are poor but happy, but it's not a trueism; people in Senegal are frequently sucking their teeth and appearing to be not happy in the slightest. But most of the people I have met in this green and hilly city do seem to be laughing. My taxi driver, Ibrahim, laughs whenever I say something, even if it's not funny, and he laughs even when I am talking on the phone to someone else and definitely not saying anything funny. It's nice to be around, it seems a well-rounded place.

Yesterday I ran around the city and was met with the usual disdain at the various ministries, but I did meet incredibly helpful people, one of whom took the entire afternoon off to help me secure an interview with the governor of the central bank. At lunch time, slightly disgusted that I had a personal taxi service to myself and therefore wasn't out there meeting anyone except my taxi driver, I made him take me to a lunch spot, perched on the edge of the cliff going down to the sea.



Outside, a man was selling jeans. Inside, two men in stetsons discussed over beer and hot pepper soup what appeared to be a legal case, the one advising the other how he could "get off". We ate our soup and cassava, and Ibrahim chewed the meat. I went to the toilet, down an incredibly narrow and wet hallway, and through a wooden door which was so narrow that even sideways I scraped both my back and front on the soggy mouldy wall. the toilet seat was refreshingly English, mounted on a block, with a drain falling to the sea below.

Afterwards, to my delight, Ibrahim took me down the steps and along a gutter (was this where my hot pepper soup had landed just moments before?) to the dried fish market where women and children hustled, pigs slept amongst the effluence on the beach, and a small boy shitted right where he was.



It was nice that it didn't occur to Ibrahim that it might be unsafe for me with my expensive camera and wallet full of Leones. Of course, it wasn't, and the only people who paid attention to me were two kids who winked and asked me to take their picture.



On the way back through the streets of colourful wooden houses, I saw some buses and taxis with carefully painted tail slogans. "Sea Never Dry" and "Leh Dem Talk", and then, "Jesus is Lord" printed around a halo emblazoned on the perfectly round tummy of a man coming towards me. "Eats eats," hissed a young boy through the car window, selling snacks.