To ease my imminent integration into European social ways, I went to a McDonalds in the airport and my observations and thoughts were as follows:

*I am happy to see French people eating here. They have their BigMacs with beer.
*This is the busiest place in the airport
*In the ten years since I was in a McDonalds, nothing has improved taste-wise, and the carrots in little packets do not look appetising either
*Depressed

I spent a large percentage of the last two days in clothes shops, trying to buy clothes that will ultimately make me look like every other girl in Europe, but desperate not to have to go to my job interview in old jeans and flip-flops. In Zara, I could not make sense of the sizes and everything, from the teeny tiny numbers to the really big numbers that were hidden in a corner, seemed to be the same size and I eventually gave up. I did find one nice item though, a jacket with minuscule arms, so I got into the changing room and took a photo to show Omar. I also bought a nightie, which I will wear as a boubou.

It was good to get somewhere near home. Lisbon was aflame with jacaranda trees, and fallen purple blossom lined the city’s cobbled streets. My friend Marta, one of my Bissau sisters, got us tickets to a puppet show on the first night, in which the principle actors were two tea kettles and a piece of spaghetti. Last night we went to a beautiful Congolese dance performance, with a choral version of Jimi Hendrix’s Vodou Child and the intricate, danced-out memories of a man from Kisangani. One night we went to a Togolese dance class, and Marta and I pretended we were back in some dirty nightclub on Bissau’s outskirts and danced shaking Angolan koudouru during the break. We walked and looked at architecture, ate fantastic small cheeses, and drank café in old hole-in-the-wall shops and watched the trams go by.

Today we cooked a cockerel from Marta’s grandmother’s farm which even cut into three, was a monster. Quince jelly reminded me of my granny, and the time I took all their quinces from the tree and annoyed my grandfather, who rang me up to tell me so. Pastels de nata, possibly one of the finest creations on the cake creation scale, at midnight, described on a postcard as ‘little custard queens’.

When I came to say my goodbyes, I looked around my little house and thought, I will be really pleased not to sleep here again. I will be happy not to wake up caked in dust, happy not to have to search high and low for a pot to boil water in that does not have a hole in its bottom.

But when Papa called me into his room to say goodbye, it was very different. He clasped my left hand, the hand that Mandinkas say goodbye with because it's the hand of the heart, and said,

"Please tell your father that my health is fine, that we are all fine, and that I hope his health is fine. Please tell him that you have been a good daughter to us, and that you are a part of us, that we will miss you. Please tell him that."

I turned away and sobbed.

One of the things that has surprised me most on this trip to Ziguinchor is how desperately dull life is. The days drag by unmarked by the usual routines of work, so that any day could be Saturday, or Wednesday. Mealtimes are the only thing that bring any sense of time into the day, although dinner is now a kind of spawn-like porridge that is nothing if not monotonous. At night I can not sleep; I simply haven’t done enough during the day.

It was very different for me when I lived and worked here, and I was constantly busy, interviewing peanut traders, writing articles, going on trips to visit remote villages. When I look around the place now, when I have none of that going on, I can’t understand how this was ever my life. It seems so foreign.

A couple of days of not working- and I even have books and writing to keep me company- and my will to do anything has been sapped. I can’t think of anything to set my alarm for in the morning, and the afternoon is too hot to do anything but sleep. The evening is just a long downhill run to dinner time, and beyond that to the moment when sleep might just catch me. It’s no wonder that nothing ever happens here; nothing comes of nothing.

It rained in the night, just a small bit, but the first rains of the season. It feels like a real blessing that I was here to hear it. I awoke in the night and could hear it drumming on the roof, and quickly went back to sleep feeling that all was OK.

Early this morning, a giant mango fell from the tree and plummeted onto my corrugated metal roof, rolling and then thudding to the ground. I didn't have a hope of claiming it; there was a scramble as the children dived in, scrabbling in the dirt to get their small fingers around the hard green fruit.

It’s humid tonight in Ziguinchor; the rains are building up but are still a long way off. The sky, close to dusk, is pearly as the light catches the gathering clouds. A man reads the news in wolof, the sound crackling from a radio in the distance, and there is the rise and fall of the women of the house chatting, arguing, bellowing from outside, where it is cool.

Things have changed and things are the same. One of the girls is pregnant, her stomach protruding and her breast large beneath a stained red t-shirt. She was always in trouble, this girl, having been found on the streets of Dakar, the daughter of a distant relative, by NS and brought up as one of her own children. But she never really recovered, perhaps 16 is too old to rescue a child, and when I lived here the house was always full of the stories of F, and her insistence on jumping over the compound wall at night, running feral in the town, staying out with boys till dawn and sleeping all day.

She used to be slim and wear tight jeans, skimpy tops. Now her breast droop, she has heavy acne on her jaw, and she looks old and tired, although probably only 22. The father of the child appears to have moved into the compound too, so the boys’ room- with a small double bed and no room for anything else- must now have about 5 men in there. They emerge at various times in the morning, each looking too big for the corrugated metal doorway, and definitely too big to be sharing one small bed.

Another thing which has changed, which I have been following in the news but never really quite appreciated, is that everyone is poorer. It is palpable. The one tap for the house, plumbed into the perimeter wall, now has a sturdy lock on it so that only she with the key, the indomitable NS, can make the expensive liquid run. Papa has already told me, by phone to Dakar yesterday, that they are in a crisis, but the most pressing of problems is the water bill, which they simply can not pay. I am expected to find a solution, which now that I see how bad things are, could not argue with.

There is not a pot in the house in which I could boil water, because they all have holes in them. Yet none have been thrown away; a pot with a hole is better than no pot. Although I had to boil water twice to get a cup full; the water dripped all the way down the gas bottle and onto the ripped lino floor.

This was after I noticed that lunch, a welcoming, generous dish of fried fish and onion sauce, was cooked on a coal burner. We used to use coal for the slow-cook stuff like rice, but a gas burner for the other things that were needed more instantly, like hot water for breakfast, or the lunch sauce. Now there is no more gas in the house; the heavy bottles lie empty, pocked and rusted in the corner. I sent one of the boys out to fill one up, and notice that the price of gas has gone up a third since I last bought a bottle. For a family that probably gets through one a week, this is untenable.

I saved half of my special lunch for dinner, but the kids found it early this evening and have eaten it all.

This afternoon we had English class in which I lined 7 kids up on a bench and taught them some basic English. They can not tell the difference between ‘three’ and ‘fruit’, which in French sounds very much like the English number. One of the girls gets it all immediately, but can not concentrate for more than five minutes before she starts falling off her chair. Another of the girls, slightly older, is now speaking French and gets the English easily. She is 8, and this is the fourth language she understands. The boys are slower, although the quieter ones better, and the little boys from next door who look like they were starved of oxygen at birth, are actually brighter than they look. Kati, who is beautiful and not much trouble, doesn’t get it at all; I expect she will always be the pretty girl.

It's hard to see but these are sheep.

I spent the morning re-packing my boxes. Inshallah, my things are now on their way to London and I am officially a city nomad.

On my way out of the airport, I walked past the new fancy garden the President created to impress the Arabs, just on the outskirts of the airport. White, red and green japanese-style pebble gardens, with a bank of luscious grass encircled by verdant green bushes.

Atop this bank of grass, five sheep, nibbling at the President's grass.

The fat man at the post office, the one who makes me cry, was animated this morning as he took a '75% tax payment' for my birthday present. He was nattering away to a young pretty woman standing behind him at Counter No. 8.

"Did you hear that Moustapha took a second wife?" he said in Wolof, eyes popping out of his fat head.

"Ah bon?" proclaimed the woman. She looked at me and laughed when she realised I understood what they were talking about.

"Yesterday they got married," he said. "Oh yes. That's what I want now, a second wife."

The woman looked once more at me and laughed. We both were thinking the same thing. You'll never find a woman stupid enough to be your second wife. But then, with so many tax payments in his desk drawer, it's quite possible he will.