Four go on an adventure

Some of you may remember how, back when I was 5, I wanted to be a traffic warden. Later on, when I discovered swimming, I decided that my career of choice was synchronized swimming. Here is what happened this weekend.

Mona, Naomi, Julia and I went, in dubious weather conditions, to an island off the coast of Dakar for a relaxing picnic. Mona and Julia, graceful ladies that they are, were having fun practising their synchronized swimming moves while Naomi and I watched from the shore.



I never like to be left out of anything so here I am asking if I can come and play too.



See how graceful we all are? Except, oh, I seem to be the only one holding my nose, as if I'm the only one who expects to go entirely under the water.



My body didn't stay up like the others





And then I laughed so much under the water that I nearly drowned.



Come on, let's do it again.



They agree, and I get to show them that I can be dainty too.



Now it's time for the picnic. Oh. it's just a little breeze.



What the girls didn't know when we set off on this trip is that after I decided as a kid that synchronized swimming wasn't for me, I took up geology instead. Imagine my great delight, and theirs, when I discovered that the island we were on was formed of hexagonal-shaped basaltic columns formed when lava bubbled up and flowed into the sea.



Here is Julia getting into the spirit of the geology lesson and being really interested in all I have to say.






But we did have such a lovely day. Unfortunately, in my excitement to show off my new haircut I whipped my cap off on the boat and my Ray Bans flew into the sea. Goodbye lovely glasses.

Dakar raps

It's been a while since I went to a concert, could be all of two weeks, and I was a little apprehensive about agreeing to go to a hip-hop gig when I was feeling a little emotionally delicate. But I went, reminding myself that most of my reason for being in Dakar is to be able to go out and see real people making good music.

Didier Awadi is one of Senegal's most famous rappers. He was part of the group Positive Black Soul which became internationally acclaimed in the early 90s after touring with MC Solaar and Baaba Maal, and now he's going it alone. I always maintain that while I'm interested in the kind if rap people are listening to, and the stuff rappers are talking about, I don't really like listening to it as a genre of music. But then I hear albums like African Underground: The Depths of Dakar and go to gigs where rappers deliver such nicely-timed, funny and melodic lyrics and the whole audience is going wild because the beat's good, the musicians are having fun and there's a really good energy about the combined belief in whatever this person is saying, and I think, why do I always say I don't like listening to rap music?

Didier's thing is fighting illegal immigration, fighting African governments, commemorating the death of Lumumba and Thomas Sankara, disliking the French, and making really good-sounding tunes. The audience in the open-air auditorium was one-third white to two thirds-African and I noticed there was a little discomfort, or perhaps just not knowing what to do, when 300 Africans have leapt to their feet, fists jammed in the air, shouting "George Bush is a criminal" and (to my horror, because it was funny to laugh at this till it was turned to my own lame government), "Tony Blair is a criminal". The French-bashing caused a few gasps, but I kept thinking, if I described this to anyone, this scene of sitting amongst loads of black Africans while they scream the horrors of what white people have done to them, they'd fear for my safety. In fact, I found it quite warming, because where else could that happen and then afterwards everyone's milling around and chatting without a thought of race or colour in their heads, but Senegal?



One of the best parts of the evening, apart from the 40-member church choir, the Congolese singer who made amazing melodies with small clay bottles, and the kora player who managed to make the whole classical Mandinka music thing work with the Swiss-led hardcore guitars and drums, was Xuman, pictured above, who came on and did five minutes of pure and beautiful rap, in Wolof, but in a way that even I could understand.



He managed to slate the current Senegalese government in nicely-rhyming metaphors and be witty at the same time, dropping a line in at just the right time and place so that the whole crowd went wild. It was pure genius.

Once again, music reminds me why life is good, and why life in Dakar can be so fantastic. Thanks.

West African Admin

I spent the first two days of this week trying to do three things:

get my passport back from the British Embassy
get a visa to Sierra Leone
get a flight to Sierra Leone

The visa I can understand would be difficult. Countries make it hard to get visas and the fact that I, as a British passport holder (ha!), can get into pretty much any country I like without any trouble whereas a person with a name like Ibrahim won't be given so much as the passport application form, makes me feel that I should suffer for a visa at some point.

The Sierra Leone high commission in London politely informed me I would need an invitation letter from the Sierra Leoneon government. Knowing full well that it would be virtually impossible to get a) a phone line through to Sierra Leone and b) to talk to someone who would have the authority to invite me to their country and c) get them to send me a letter, I asked the man how I did that. He informed me, less politely, that he had given me all the information he was obliged to give me and it wasn't his job to make it happen for me. In other words, 'we don't want you in our country, thankyou very much'.

Next I try to find out what's happened to my passport. I had given it in at the British Embassy, along with £200, to apply for a second passport. The idea was that they LOOKED at it, but didn't sent it away anywhere to have its corner cut off (because it still has pages left in it), and gave it right back.

They said they would need to keep it and would call me when I could come and get it. They didn't call. The British Embassy in Dakar, like the Sierra Leone government, does not want you to be able to reach them. They make it virtually impossible to telephone, and when you do get through you are told, "Didn't we tell you we would call you when you can have it back?" as if there is something wrong with you for feeling a little nervous that you have to take a plane in 2 weeks, have to get a visa for somewhere else, have no ID in a country where you are asked for it even to get your letters from the post box, and someone is holding your passport for a reason which is never explained to you. So far I have: no visa, and no passport.

Next I tried to find a flight to Sierra Leone, arriving on a Wednesday. I rang two different travel agents, and they both gave me the same advice: travel on a Friday. The two airlines which fly from Dakar to Freetown leave on a Friday. I explained that since the elections were on a Saturday, I couldn't possibly fly on a Friday and could they, since they have computers infront of them which tell them about all the flights all over the world, find me a way of getting there, perhaps via another country, via Europe if I have to, on a Wednesday. The answer from both of them: travel on a Friday.

So I lied. I told them I wanted to go to Gambia on a Tuesday. I told them I would also relish the idea of staying in Banjul for the night and then taking the SN Brussels flight to Freetown the next day. "Ah!" said one of the agents, "you could go via gambia". "You have to go via Brussels" said the other.

So now I have: no visa, no passport, but I will get to spend two nights (one each way) in the Gambia. What more could I want?

Home Truths

This week I was sent two fantastic albums. One, by a Cameroonian bass player called Etienne Mbappe and the other by a group from the UK called Lau, a folk group of epic proportions that anyone with an interest in cool rocky guitary-violiny stuff (I am not a person who knows anything about this so-called folk stuff) should invest in. It's just really interesting to listen to, isn't boring and samey, the guy has a gorgeous husky voice, and it sounds like home.

Other than that, a morning with Omar the tailor making another iPod cover and bringing the third person into the Senegalese Patchwork Co-operative, the guy who's going to fit together the 165 pieces for the wedding present. Omar was tired, having not slept much, and I was making him work hard, presse to get to my breakfast meeting. I sat, sweating in his sweat shop, fanning myself and giving orders, and thought, what nicer way is there to spend a saturday morning now that Home Truths is off the air?

128 bits of fabric, 37 to go

I've got a new patchwork project on the go. I am in the process of cutting up 165 pieces of fabric. Here are 128 of them.



My friend Now came to visit this week and helped me work out how many pieces I needed for this wedding present for friends. He measured out the whole thing then counted the pieces I had already cut. This is all part of my Senegalese patchwork co-operative which I am running, which involves Omar finding me the fabric, me designing and cutting, Now counting and measuring and then one of Omar's guys in the sweatshop sewing the whole thing together. I worked out that this way I have more time for striped iPod covers and purses if I leave the boring jobs to someone else. This is the first step towards Omar and I going into the patchwork business together.

This is what I brought home from Abidjan. The first two have tiny gold dots painted on them, and are designed and made in Abidjan, so says my Ivorian cloth source.







It's incredibly hot here and I have taken to having a 4 hour break in the middle of the day in which I eat and sleep and sometimes go for a swim. The hard bit is coming back to work afterwards, especially when the rest of the country stops work at Friday lunch time and never comes back to work. If I went to the mosque like everyone else, I wouldn't feel so guilty about taking the afternoon off.

Fixing my shoes

Airplanes in west Africa are like buses, a friend once said to me. They can't help stopping when they pass a place with people. Flying back from Abidjan, making my way northwards, we passed over endless green and rivers, battling through thick heavy rain cloud.

"This is Sierra Leone," said my neighbour, glancing out of the window. "We must be arriving in Conakry soon." He said it as if he were on the bus and we had just passed through East Croydon.

Arriving in Conakry, a whole lot of people got off and another lot got on. Through the window I saw a motorised luggage truck ramming a suitcase and destroying its front end. The man in charge of luggage shouted to the driver to reverse, which he did, but no amount of thumping the case would get it back in shape. I was glad it wasn't mine.

Finally getting to Dakar, I realised that I would have to face the mean taxi men at the airport. From the plane I called Sow, my faithful taxi man, and told him I was at the airport.

"I missed you," he said, and added he'd be there in a flash.

When I finally got out of the airport, I saw Sow coming towards me in a smart new shirt, waving. He had had a haircut too, and looked younger. After he had put my stuff in the boot, he climbed into the taxi, but not into the driver's seat: there was already someone driving the car.

I asked him why he wasn't driving his own taxi.

"It's my day off today. My friend's using the car instead."

He had left his home to come to the airport to make sure that I found the car alright. We dropped him off home again before we went to my place. Sow is a rare gem.

**************

Dakar. The first thing I did, of course, was to visit Omar the tailor. I had brought him some fabric from Abidjan and I wanted him to get to work on my trousers. On the way to Omar's, I passed a young guy fixing shoes. My high heels broke at the Queen's Birthday Party and I wasn't sure if it was the kind of thing one of the 'shoe doctors' who fix shoes by the side of the road could fix. I was sure I would have to take my favourite shoes to the man who actually makes shoes, so he could replace my heel tip.

Abdou the shoe doctor was about 17 and didn't speak any French. I showed him the shoes and one of his customers, a young girl, translated for me from Wolof. He would replace the shoe tips for such-and-such a price. I whistled through my teeth and loked unsure.

"OK, donne" he said, agreeing to my price.

I realised, it being evening, that I would have to leave my favourite shoes with him overnight, and suddenly felt unsure. Having size 9 feet, high heels are not something that for me are easy to find. But Abdou said he would do it in half an hour. Somehow I thought that was unlikely.

On my way back from Omar, I saw that the little street where Abdou had set up his table was empty. The man with the pousse-pousse cart of fruit had gone home and the peanut sellers had disappeared too. I had visions of Abdou hawking my size 9s around Dakar, up and down traffic jams on the corniche calling out "bon chaussures, grand chaussures" as he thrust them in people's faces through car windows.

But there he was, waiting for me, my shiny fixed shoes sitting on a little stool where his table been earlier.

"Donne cadeau" said his friend who wandered over to watch me hand over the money.

I told his friend that I had just given my tailor a ream of beautiful Ivorian fabric. If Abdou became my regular shoe fixer, then I would give him a cadeau too.

A night out in Abidjan

Today I got over an enormous hurdle which has been looming on my horizon for about three years. I wrote the first, and only (so far), paragraph of a short story which I have been wanting to write for some time. For a long time after I started making my living from writing articles, I still thought of myself as a writer, not a journalist: journalism was just what I did to make money. Slowly, I have forgotten about that and just enjoy what I do.

Recently, my perceived 'inability' to write has been haunting me, my fear that if I do start to write, it won't be any good, or that it will be too hard to do, or even worse, that I won't do it at all. The fear stops it from happening, and so for a year or so now I have been putting it off, telling myself that I am too tired to write at the weekends when all I do all week is write. This week away in Abidjan, I thought as I sat on the plane feeling free from all weight of Dakar and of my job, I will write, I will have all week to write. Of course, all I really wanted to do was to read, but this morning, Sunday, I sat down and I started to write. Even if no one ever reads it, I hope I will finish it. Just to let myself know that I can still do it.

********

On Friday night, we went out to a bar in one of the districts of Abidjan. It had rained heavily, and it was still before midnight so things were quiet. There had also been an attack on the Prime Minister's plane in the morning, and three people had died. Many people were staying at home.

Abidjan is much more developed than Dakar in its basic infrastructure. Shanty towns still nestle in the green crook of hillsides between large, middle-classed neighbourhoods, and the slum-road that leads of kilometres out of the city towards the countryside is much the same as Dakar- mosques, little roadside stalls, bars, girls in boubous walking together along the congested road. But in Abidjan there are shopping malls with escalators, there are street lights, and there are pavements. There are even curbs, that you can not drive up, and that people don't.

But the bars still have one thing in common: pretty girls in tiny outfits vying for the attentions, however short term, of the white man.

The 'Taxi Brousse' was a lot more colourful and well-kept than the average Senegalese hooker bar, with an impressive glitter ball rotating on the ceiling spinning out not just white but red lights too. The bar, rectangular, had bar stools all around it and we three took our seats on one side and ordered our drinks. A stunningly beautiful woman in a small red miniskirt and matching top sporting a pair of intellectual-style glasses (which I am certain were not to help her see) smiled charmingly as she served us. Other girls, all dressed in similar red outfits, dittied up and down seeing to the clients. More pretty young girls sat on the other side of the bar, some getting up to dance on the empty dancefloor and inspect themselves closely in the wall mirrors as they flicked their hips to Ivorian pop music, others chattering on the elbows of the white men who began at midnight to drift in to their, no doubt, favourite joint.

The lone man, probably French military, sitting across from us on the other side of the bar, was not lone for long. A young girls in a stretchy black and white shirt, siddled up, clinked glasses with him gleefully, then within minutes was lolling her head on his shoulder with a puppy-dog vacant look on her face, which was almost charming. For once, I thought, I am not the target. Not an Ivorian man in sight.

We moved onto another bar, slightly more run-down but even more entertaining. This place had an 'orchestre', a group of young guys and an older guitarist (who was forced to play standing on the dance floor because the stage was too small to accommodate him) who played every kind of cover song you can think of: Stuck on You, a Richard Bona hit and as much Reggae, Antilles and Ivorian pop you can desire. The lead singer was wonderful, so full of energy for every single song, even though they play there four nights a week, every week, to the same clientele- hookers and the odd ageing white man.

During the band's break, there was some commotion as three young guys shuffled onto the dancefloor, took the mics and started to body pop and dance an outrageously athletic and expressive dance routine. They each wore large diamante studs in their ears, wore chains around their wrists and necks, and one had a tough hip-hop twirl of plaits which wound around his head like a pretty African village girl. The hookers went wild, jigging up to thrust money down the boys' shirts, taking the opportunity to dance a little dance on their way back to their sits. A photograph projected onto the wall beside the dancefloor showed a white girl with an 80s perm, naked from the waist up. I felt like I had stumbled into someone else's life, and felt bad for finding it thoroughly amusing.

City comparisons

After another afternoon of sweaty, backbreaking dancing, I was taken out for dinner at an Ivorian 'Maquis', a semi open-air restaurant in a ramshackle little street in the local neighbourhood. To one side, some rough wooden tables covered in plastic Guiness table cloths and to the other side, some grills and a table covered in skewers of beef and large fresh fish.

We chose our food, which came with friend plantain, had some beer, and listened to the upbeat Ivorian pop music spilling out of a bar behind us. The waitress was pleasant and polite, the food was fantastically fresh, good tasting and not expensive, and I now find myself looking at Dakar as if she were the ugly sister who can't quite get stuff right. And disliking, immensely, myself for it.

Dancing in Abidjan

Arriving in Abidjan by plane, you can't help but notice the vast expanse of water stretching across the city. Stepping outside of the air conditioned airport, it feels like the water is just as much in the air as it is in the lagoons and rivers of the city's landscape. Dakar is hot, but it's a heat with no respite because the rains haven't yet come so the heat never breaks. Everything is dry, yellow, sunburnt, uninspiring. This is the Africa I had got used to, especially as the African country I know best after Senegal is Mauritania, even more dry, more yellow, more sparse in its signs of life.

Abidjan, on the other hand, is like the Africa of novels, it's the tropical rains, the deep green grasses, the puddles by the side of the road, thick flowering bushes, gardens bursting with life, rains dripping through the leaves of every tree. The air is hot, but so wet that it's almost cooling, and there is no direct, burning sun. Cloud obscures everything, which in these parts, is good.

Last night my friend and I went to the shops and drove by the artists' village where Dobet Gnahore grew up. We got caught in the car on a crossroads where the traffic wasn't moving, and no one could escape from the gridlock. It was dark, much darker than I am used, and women sold sweetcorn on the pavements beside us. One by one, people got out of their cars, or clients got out of the red taxis which dot the city's traffic jams, and started to direct cars around eachother. A young boy approached a robust white four wheel drive with the black letters 'UN' stamped on its doors, with a six foot long radio arial bending across its roof, as he begged for money through the jam. An older boy stood infront of our car and slowly moved us through the traffic until we were out the other side and driving up to the commune. We gave him 100 francs, and he moved onto the next client in need of his freelance traffic wardening skills.

This afternoon I went to the village to take my first dance class. My teacher is called Rita, a young Ivorian dancer who showed me into a cupboard to get changed and then swept the water from the crumbling open-air auditorium floor. We started with the dance of central Cote d'Ivoire, performed with the chest almost parallel to the ground, bottom out, and led by the neck which juts forwards and back as the chest, back and arms follow. The founder of the village, called Were Were (pronounced Weray Weray), came to watch how we were getting along, her dreadlocks falling the her stout waist, her carved wooden walking stick in her hand. When she tried to help me coordinate my head and hands I saw a reflection of myself, so white, in the terrific glassiness of her eyes, and I realised that she looks at me as if she can see right through me. She has a smile, a constant glow in her face, which is both comforting and perturbing at the same time, as if this mother figure could cut you down with just a single glance.

We danced for two hours, the drummer sometimes stopping to answer his mobile phone, and I sweated as much liquid as I could get inside me. In the breaks I practised some Senegalese dance moves, feeling good to be in an enviroment where people experiment and pracise, rather than the Senegalese sabar parties where the girls are so intimidating that anyone short of a professional would be mad to try and join in. My body is aching, I am still hot from the exertion, but feeling good.

Patchwork Elbow

Anyone who's been to my house recently will have been quizzed on the new patchwork cloth, and what to do with it.



I've given myself patchwork elbow sewing the little squares together after a long day's work at my desk next door, but it is at last finished and now I don't know what to do with it. Originally it was going to be a pair of trousers, for a boyfriend who, happily, showed his true colours before I got onto row 2, so now it has developed in to two metres of pinks, greens, blues and the odd piece of orange scattered throughout, and it's going to be for me.



I wanted to make it into a pair of trousers for myself, but then I moved onto the idea of a dress, then someone suggested I use it to make another bedspread, a chaise longue, cushions, a ball gown, a tunic, and now I am back to the trousers. But at this rate it's not going to be anything because it's still sitting on the back of a chair being shown to anyone who comes to visit, and Omar the tailor is still waiting for me to come down and give him instructions on what to do with it.

It's been a busy few weeks, and it's suddenly got very hot. I've been spending my saturdays at Now's new shop, where his niece cooks lunch and we drink Nescafe and I amuse his clients by getting up from the broken plastic chair I sit on outside the shop to sell them one cigarette or a teaspoon of pepper. I guess they've never seen a white person spoon washing powder (bought in bulk) into little plastic bags then tied in elaborate knots and hung on a metal wire to be displayed on the back wall before. I've also been working hard, having the annual contemplation of moving to another country, but mostly just trying to do my job well, make new friends and amuse myself with music and going to the tailor to find new scraps of fabric.

I recently wrote an article about an Ivorian singer called Dobet Gnahore, who gave probably the best performance I have seen in a year at the French Cultural Centre in Dakar. She's an absolute fireball of a woman, a singer, dancer, actor, drummer, who's intimidating in her talent on stage but just the nicest sweetest and most modest woman in person. She grew up in an artists' commune in Abidjan, where she learnt every art under the sun, and as I was researching this village, it reminded me of how when I came to Africa I was going to dance, that I said to myself, even if I never find any work, at least I will be able to do what I love most: to dance. Luckily I found a lot of work, but I never did much dancing. So, I am off to Abidjan today to stay with my friend and spend the week taking dance classes in Dobet Gnahore's village.

Next post from Cote d'Ivoire, then.

While I was in South Africa I received an excited email from my friend Idi in Dakar.

"We have some big news," he told me, but didn't tell me any more.

The next day I received an email from Now.

"Madam, I have something exciting to tell you," he said. I couldn't resist, so I called him up to ask what the news was.

"The tree has some flowers!" he said. And here they are. The frangipani tree which we planted to long ago in Mamelle, long before I moved, has at last produced some beautiful, sweet-smelling flowers.



I thought that was all the news I was going to get. But when I went to visit, Now told me his other piece of news. He's opened a new shop, in the depths of Ouakham, a neighbourhod not far from the original shop in Mamelle. It's a small place, a hole-in-the-wall kind of joint, but, he tells me, it's working really well. Single cloves of garlic and little sachets of black pepper are the big sellers, as people in this neighbourhood (euphamistically known as a 'quartier populair') don't tend to stock up on things like other people do. Why buy a whole head of garlic when you can just buy what you need?



So as Idi and Awa run one shop, Now's friend Samba runs the other. And Now runs between the two all day long.



While I was taking photos, a guy selling shoes came along and asked me to photograph him. Then he told me I couldn't take the photo to France and make money from it, which just about ruined my plans.



So nice to be back with my friends. I always forget when I'm away, how much my Mamelle crew mean to me. Then when I come off the plane at 2 in the morning and see Now standing there fighting off the taxi touts and the money changers, I know that as much as I miss 'home' (I don't even know where that is anymore), I like Dakar too.

Actually, when Now came to pick me up from the airport last week, I decided, for the first time, to change some money while I was there. I had some Euros, and no CFA, so I asked the guy if I could change 40 Euros. Sure, he said, just give me 25,000 francs. I did. Then he said I had to give him one Euro commission. When I said that I didn't have to at all, he let me go. Then came running back and told Now that he wanted to un-do the transaction. Apparently, having failed to find a way to trick, lie, cheat or beg some money out of me, he decided he would be much better off changing money with some other toubab.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

For much of my childhood and most of my adult life, there's been an old friend in it. I'm not a dog person but I grew up with Pippa, and she was, for a dog, amusing and friendly. She died early this year and the powers that be waited until I was back in England before we scattered her (small) remains somewhere peaceful.



This was her favourite beach.

While we were in the neighbourhood, we took a visit to a place where we used to go as kids, Dungeoness. Such a gloomy name and with a dis-used nuclear power station hovering over the pebbly beach, almost a gloomy place. But not quite. We had fish and chips in the Railway Cafe, which is, thankfully, just as it used to be (except with the addition of plastic flowers on the plastic table cloths), and we ventured, in true British form, to the beach for just long enough to know that it was way too cold too hang around.

We went somewhere really nice for the weekend

I and the team went somewhere really super nice for the weekend, within drivable distance of Dakar, a clean, perfectly sandy beach with good swimming water, a lovely house right on the beach, great weather, no nuisance...and I'm not going to tell you where it was. But do enjoy the photos (views from the house).

Music link

To hear some music recorded at the wonderful Malouma's house, click here

She has a new album out on Marabi, which is really worth getting.

Another patchwork project

My latest collection. Orders can be made through me.

Thinking of giving up journalism for needlework.

Go on, aren't they just the prettiest?

Speedy photo update ending in a perfect Yorkshire Pudding

hi hi,

I've been rather slack. Moving home, elections, two trips to Mauritania, a visit from Dad- blogging got left behind.

Dad and I had a great week together, lots of going out till all hours then two relaxing days in a tree house. Yes, we slept in trees. And here is a view from mine,



followed by dad in his.



Some amusing conversations were had, generally, over Scrabble and other family activities, but my favourite was when the Belgian owner of the hotel puffed along and said, what would an Englishman know about wine?

After that, let me see, what happened next? After that I went back to Mauritania for Songlines magazine to interview the wonderful singer-politician Malouma, who you will be able to read all about in the next issue, plus soon on my website when I load her live private performance of singing the desert blues.

Remember how a while back I wrote that really smug entry about travelling and how staying in nice hotels and taking planes was a cop-out? Well, guess what? I was wrong. Taking planes, dare I say it, is much better than travelling in sept-places, and anyone who's ever done it, will agree. A sept-place, otherwise known as a bush taxi (and also otherwise known as death on four wheels) is a car that in theory takes 7 people, plus the driver. That's how we get around in these parts, unless you have money, or are trying to do jobs where you hope to make at least some small profit, if not break even.

I left Dakar at 5 in the morning on Monday, and 12 hours later I was in Nouakchott. But despite the length and heat, that journey was relatively easy, a friend came to pick me up from the Mauritanian border, and it was the first time in a while I'd done something like take a 7-place, so the novelty factor over-rode the fact that I was in intense physical pain wedged in the back between two very large men.

But two days of tough work in the desert (Nouakchott is a city, but it's really just a largish collection of dwellings that have been plonked in the desert. I also found out that this city that houses one third of the population, has no fresh water. Something went wrong when they were planning Nouakchottout). Yes, two days of working in this place, plus being hassled by the (Senegalese) guy who worked in the guesthouse (no water, scared to put feet on the 'carpet' for fear of contracting caroet bigs, are there such a thing?) to the point that he actually came banging at my door and I had to get my stern-looking Mauritanian friend to take him aside and tell him I was his (my friend's) fiance. Yes, two days of that and I was ready to get back to Dakar.

Oh, except Dakar is 12 hours away, and real life or not, that's 12 very hot, very uncomfortable hours across the Sahara.

Rosso Mauritania, and the beautiful Senegal River at 7am,



and that was the best bit of the day. From then on it got progressively worse, until I arrived in Dakar with a dehydration headache so bad that I had to be laid down in a dark room until I was well enough to put some food in my stomach. Painful, horrible, should have taken the plane.

But I did enjoy myself. Malouma was an absolute inspiration and radio-journalist's dream, and the cloth market was good too.





Mauritania's a fascinating place, I'd recommend it to anyone, if you have your own car.

Now since then I've written my article (Sunday morning 8am start), and celebrated Easter Monday lunch with my favourite English girls and Senegalese boys.

Cecilia and I have been talking about this roast beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch for a week now. On Saturday, after a post-traumatic 7-place stress episode in which I woke up in tears on Saturday morning and neither stopped crying nor got out of my pyjamas all day, I did manage to get down to the shop and buy my joint of beef, and ingredients for the Yorkshire Pud, or Yorkshire Biscuit (for its special crispy texture) as it's known in my family.

After much internet browsing for recipes and roasting times, Cecilia produced the most perfect YP ever



crispy (but not burnt) on the bottom, just the right chewyness, and it went wonderfully with gravy and cabage and great roast potatoes, followed by steam chocolate pudding and Birds Custard (my contribution), much enjoyed by all.



All the English girls agreed that for a few minutes, it was like being back home.

All the Senegalese boys agreed that we are the best cooks ever, and then went back to their ernest discussions about music.

New Home!

Back from the Sahara, feeling better for my camel milk, but disturbed to find out that perhaps my illness was brought on not by some hard-core desert bacteria, but by the air-conditioning.

There have been requests for pictures of my new flat. It's hard to take photos inside, I discover, especially every time I step back I knock into a wall or door.

The living room, also the bedroom, also the sewing room, looking out to balcony number one.



The famous sewing table, complete with diamante-studded bobbin-drawer knob.



Bookshelves, and Rama, Mave and Aminata, the three African ladies of the house. Beware, wrong-doers.



And some old-school draining-board action.



Here's our favourite neighbour Zal, making the cathedral look rather peaky,



And favourite neighbour number 2, Cecilia, organising a first-day-in-new-home lunch.



Happy as a bee...

Shifting Sands

Mauritania is a special place, a cross-roads for Sahara trade which goes back centuries. For hundreds of years, people have been coming here from all over the world, settling, then moving on again. The result is that if you took a random cross-section of people here, you can bet that you'd find faces resembling every nation on earth.



Check out my website for more pictures

In the last couple of days I've been struck down with a fever and a chest infection, so I've been stumbling through my interviews and trying to put out stories, all the while feeling terrible. This afternoon though, perhaps the relief of the elections being over, I felt a little better and went out to the edge of Nouakchott, only a mile or so away, and watched the shifting sand dunes.



Nomads come here for a few months a year, bringing their camels with them, and sell camel milk by the side of the road. So as a Sunday afternoon treat, we stopped by and sat in our old-school Mercedes and drank a warm bowl of milk, fresh from the camel.



It is strangely delicious and I feel better now than I have in days. Although of course the local remedy for a chest infestion (which Mauritanians get a lot, because of the sand in the air,) is warm camel milk.

Shop improvements

One of the only things that went wrong during the move was that I lost my camera cable. So none of you will be able to see the beautiful view through the French doors until I find the damn thing.

A while before I left Mamelles, Now made improvements to his shop.



He extended it backwards for more shelf space, opened up the side with a large window, and created a lovely little garden. We found planks of wood and balanced them on rocks to make a bench, and planted some plants to keep the frangipani tree happy. Not only does he now sell things like cake and local milk, but it has also created a lovely space in the street for people to come and relax in, lying on the mat under the shade of the trellis, or sitting on the benches and making tea. Everyone agrees that it's the nicest shop in Dakar.



The bread is still delivered in the same way though.



I miss Mammelle and Now but life changes and this life is good too.

In other news, it's my birthday tomorrow and I will be 28. When I was 27, 28 seemed so old! I seem to remember I was getting unnecessarily concerned by my lack of partner, but I was confusing that with something much more important: friends. Now that I have a lot more wonderful, reliable, funny friends here, I feel as happy as a bee.

Moving home

There is a way to do things and there is a Senegalese way to do things. I have never hired a removal van before, in any country, so I’m not sure I am the authority on how removal vans should be packed, but I will attempt to describe the way in which packing a house up is done in Senegal.

First of all, you send someone you know and trust, a man, and a Senegalese, to walk up to random strangers who happen to be driving along in, or sitting in, or sleeping in, truck-type vehicles (this could extend to four legged powered vehicles). You get their phone numbers, and then on the night before you are due to move your entire belongings to the other side of town, you get that same friend to start calling them, ploughing through the “this number is not available at this time” messages until you find one who has given you a number that works. Then you tell him what you need, and you tell him how much you can pay.

This pricing arrangement does not of course work with people who have unlimited funds, like I do. If I paid “as much as I have” every time I was asked to, I would be long broke. But my trusty companion Now took charge of the whole process and he said he had £15, and so that is what he arranged, for two trips from my old house by the sea to my new house in town, on Friday morning.

By Thursday night the flat was dirty, empty-looking, and very sad. Luckily the witch who lives downstairs was clanging away, her screeching voice reverberating through the tiled building, and it acted as a necessary reminder as to why I was moving from this lovely neighbourhood where my friends were literally on my doorstep from morning to night, to another part of town where people probably don’t say hi to each other in the street.

I sat in the shop on Thursday night with Now and I made tea. At the beginning of this talk of moving, months ago, Now had protested (but understood), loudly. Now that the move has arrived, he says nothing, but the silence is deafening. My silence says I feel the same way.

Before the sun had risen on Friday morning, I was at the telephone company office paying for the transfer of my phone line. By the time I got back, the van had arrived and Now was giving the driver, a young man who said very little, breakfast of Nescafe and powdered milk from an old margarine tub cup. When Naomi had moved her belongings and the horse and cart that was to take them to her new place out of the way, we started loading the van.

Now had brought his room-mate George along to help. George works as a security guard and used to be the guard at one of the houses in our street. He was the one who removed the frog from my plant the week I moved into my flat, a year and a half ago. George had been at work all night and was on his way to bed when Now cornered him into coming to help. He made out it was just what he wanted to be doing after a night standing out in the cold watching someone’s house.

Little by little, the plants, the boxes of jam-jars, the bags of shoes and boubous, the endless cushions, and then the bigger things- the teak table which takes three men to move, the bed, the bookshelves, they all came down the stairs, and no one complained, they all made out they were having a whale of a time. The driver got inside the van and lumped the boxes around, as I winced and asked my self what I would do if my Mexican olive-oil pourer got smashed, and then the driver took everything out again and the baskets went in, then they didn’t fit either so the table went in, then the baskets, then the boxes, and after an hour, every single one of my belongings minus the fridge and bed, had gone inside this tiny little van, and there was not an inch of space, not one tiny little crack of air left, and it felt pretty much like a miracle had taken place.

******

It’s always a surprise to me when some part of my life changes and I discover that I am not the totally self-sufficient Superwoman that I imagine I should be able to be. Last night, lying in bed with the parrot squeaking away in the beauty salon three floors below (“Better a parrot than that hell-fire witch-face downstairs from you in Mamelles,” said Cecilia), and the roar of the city outside the French doors, I felt like I had been severed.

It’s true that it is hard to live alone in Africa. There has to be a small team of people around you who can help clean the ever-pervading dust from everything you own, who can find you an oven when you want to buy one, who can put you in touch with the man at the electricity company who will connect your flat up without delay, who can find you boxes, get you vegetables, tell you where to buy an ironing board, find you rice at lunch time. Because nothing is straight forward here, you don’t fix things by going to the shop and replacing them, and life takes a lot of energy.

When I moved to Dakar from Ziguinchor permanently, I barely knew anyone and certainly not people who knew where to find, and how to bang in, masonry nails. But Now’s boutique, and the people around it, provided me first with practical help, and later, solid rewarding friendship. Somehow, despite coming from totally different cultures and educations and upbringings, Now is one of the tiny group of people in Senegal who I could tell anything to, and expect an understanding response. And now it feels like he is a very long way away.

*****

But settle in I am starting to do. This morning, Sunday, despite being out till 6am, I unpacked the rest of the boxes, and arranged a little furniture. From where I sit at my table, through the balcony doors I can see the imposing white cathedral (about 100 metres away) and hear the choir singing. I can see the ministry of information just across the way, and look down into the American Embassy. There is a cool breeze and although I can hear traffic, I can’t hear my neighbour screaming, for which I am truly grateful. There is a very nice feeling in the flat, which I sensed immediately that I came to look around. I think I will be happy here.

Pictures to follow...

High winds and high seas

Senegal has been hit by a tremendous storm, its most recent development being that Dakar is cold, with a biting wind whipping sand through the houses and along the streets. I was in the south for ten days or so, initially working and lying by the pool (at the same time) while I checked through the internet what the situation in Guinea looked like. Then I went off for a week to Boucotte, a village on the coast of Casamance, where I thought I would have a lovely relaxing time.

It was quite clear by the first day at Boucotte, when I had already finished two books and was the only person staying in the campement, that I hadn't brought enough to read or to do. I am not someone who can sit down and do nothing, I get fidgety and need to be usefully employed if I am to be relaxed. The young guy working at the guest house felt sad for me, I think, and while the wind whistled through the empty buildings with the sea roaring on the other side of the trees, I ate in silence while this guy sat on the other side of the solitary table and stared at me, just to make me feel less alone. I did try explaning to him that I wanted to be alone, that I had things to think about, but he just laughed, unsure, and carried on staring at me.

By day 2, I was ready to get out of there. I walked the 6 km or so along the totaly deserted but clear white sand beach to the nearest town, Cap Skirring, thinking I would find somewhere to stay in town. But when I was abused on the beach by rastas who accused me of being racist because I didn't feel like hanging out with them (and eventually handing over money or completing marriage vows), I decided enough was enough. I would go anywhere, just as long as it wasn't there.

When I eventually got back to the hotel I saw my escape route: a 4x4 truck which had brought a group of French tourists. After a painful night in which I was made to sit alone with my back to the group, like a naughty school child, by the young guy who clearly doesn't have a clue how to run a friendly guesthouse, I managed to get a lift with the group in the morning. Being being tourists and impressively excited about everything, the first stop was a village school. Across the sandy yard, a fierce wind was blowing.



We sat in a class while the corrugated iron roof rippled and roared in the wind, and the teacher, in a suit made from colourful African wax print fabric, told us how tough it was to run a school in a rural area. Every day, he said, parents would come to the classroom and ask for their sons and daughters to come and help them in the field, planting or harvesting rice. If the teacher refused, the child would never be allowed to come back to school. When an entire generation grows up illiterate, never experiencing school themselves, it has detrimental effects on the next generation.

Luckily the teacher seemed to be ahead of the game, and although the state has failed to provide the class with any books, he had bought one himself and would write up on the board any reading exercises that needed to be done so that they wouldn't get behind. And when he had first started there, 95% of the school were boys. Thanks to going from house to house and asking parents to let their daughters come to school too, that figure is now roughly half and half.

I made some friends at the school while we played around the tree which has the school bell attached to it. It's made out of an old car wheel and gets banged with a stick to call students to class.










Really cool girls with lots of funk.

So that day, in the relative luxury of a 4x4 truck, I was delivered with the French tourists to Carabane Island, my favourite place on earth. There I lay on the beach and read and when the books were finished, I wrote. For two days, because of the wind (which brought the sea up to the wall of the house, so that we were marooned on our own house-shaped island) there was no fish. So Loulou, the only other person in the house, and I made up creative recipes with onions, rice and one aubergine. At last, on the final day, the wind died down and Loulou went fishing. Within ten minutes he came back and threw the net at my feet: fifteen wriggling fish. He and I grilled them on the fire and it was, kind of, blissful.