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.

There is something slightly naughty about sewing a thousand pounds into the back pocket of your trousers in an airport toilet. But I am not money smuggling, I am going on a work trip to a place without cash machines, exchange bureaus, or electricity.

Arriving at Gatwick, I was informed at the Astraeus airline desk that our plane, due to carry on from Freetown to Monrovia, will infact go to Monrovia first, even though it is further away, and then return to Freetown. This is because the runway landing lights at Monrovia are not working and have not been fixed, and the plane must land in daylight in Monrovia. For me this means that the already-long flight will be two or more hours longer, and that I will not land just at dusk, but in full darkness.

The Sierra Leonean man behind me in the queue, three enormous Brixton market suitcases on a trolley, told the bony English airline worker at the head of the queue that it was inconvenient, this addition to our journey. I was just about to leap in and complain myself when I saw the airline man give a loud “tut”, then turn his back on the Sierra Leonean, and start talking to his colleague.

“You can’t get angry at us for feeling put out,” I said to the man, upset that he had been so dismissive of the African. I know for sure that he wouldn’t have turned his back on an English man.

“Well, it’s not my fault if Monrovia airport can’t fix their lights. They should have done it a month ago and I’m sorry to say it but it’s typical Africa not to have done it yet,” he said.

I bristled.

Then I remembered when I lived in Ziguinchor and our airport was closed for months on end because there was no airport fence and a plane had hit a pig crossing the runway. On the day that the airport was due to re-open, a new perimeter fence protecting planes and pork-life, Air Senegal cancelled our flight because they refused to land there, as the fence, after months of work, still wasn’t finished.

I had nothing more to say. But felt cross with the guy anyway.

London. On Sunday I met Baaba Maal. There is a long story behind this. When I first went to Senegal, seven years ago, I tried meeting with Baaba, and ended up following him around the country until I got so frustrated with nearly meeting him but not quite that I went to his house in Podor only to find out he had gone to Matam. I slept in the house, and after seven more years of futilely following him around, I gave up.

On Sunday a friend introduced us and he said, "Why have I never seen you in Dakar?". What could I say?

On Friday I went to a gig in Camden, in a small vegetarian restaurant called the Green Note. A Senegalese singer was playing with his band, and there were sixty people or so gathered. Half way through the gig, the singer made an anouncement:

"Tonight we have a very special guest here: Toumani Diabate."

For me, this is like meeting Baaba Maal. or Bob Dylan. Toumani is the world's finest kora player. His last album, recorded with the Symmetric Orchestra, was groundbreaking and beautiful. You can hear a track from it at the very bottom of this page He is someone I have written about and admired for years. And there he was, in a tiny bar in Camden, playing the kora.

Afterwards I went out onto Parkway and found him smoking a cigar, leaning on his walking stick, against the railings. I told him how honoured I was to meet him. I sounded like everyone else who probably tells him the same thing every day. But I didn't want any more time to go by and still not to have met this inspirational musician.

So, London has turned up some nice surprises. And now I am off again, this time to Freetown. Insh'allah.

I dread Dakar airport at the best of times, but with a bicycle on my luggage trolley hoping to get it on a flight to London, the task seemed monumental. Now and I had wrapped the bike up in rice sacks and gaffa tape but I feared that the police at the airport door would shake their heads with glee and declare, ‘C’est pas sure’.

Sow the taxi man arrived on the dot of 4am, as ever punctual and ready for the job ahead, the seats already folded down. Sow has seat belts in his car and worries if I don’t put one on.

At the airport, all was quiet. Beside the taxi rank, usually brimming with touts and old men keen to extort a few thousand francs, a row of young men lay lined up on a set of concrete steps, fast asleep. One sat with his head between his knees, his beige t-shirt pulled up over his head. Another, wearing a woolly rasta cap, had laid his neck on the lip of the step, as if it were a feather pillow.

A young guy with a squeaky-wheeled trolley appeared and quietly took my cases and bicycle away. He was happy with his coin, and didn’t ask me to change money. The gendarme on the door smiled as I wheeled my trolley through, and the man at the Air Maroc desk apologised for the fact that I would have excess luggage, then said, ‘C’est pas grave’ and let it go. The military man at the oversized luggage door said my bike would arrive with me in London, insh’allah.

Outside, I went to the boutique, a crowded shop at the end of the dark car park. I bought an apple, then went to sit on a home-made bench of wooden planks smoothed over time by bottoms. A young guy with a Nescafe cart standing nearby said hello, and I asked him for a café au lait, with just a little sugar. We spoke Wolof.

“Are you going to sit here?” he asked, because he needed to go to the boutique to buy plastic cups.

“Go ahead, I’m staying,” I said, and he went off leaving me in the dark road with his cart, his jacket, and his money purse.

Before long, an airport employee appeared in a smart white shirt and asked if he could have some coffee.

“He’s coming back soon,” I said. “Wait.”

The coffee seller came back after a while and served the worker a cup of coffee. He was wearing a shiny black and white shirt with dollar notes printed all over it, and ‘Goodbody’ scrawled across each one. An old, skinny man in a long purple boubou, weathered by his time spent traipsing the streets and airport car park, paraded up and down not far from us, his hands clasped behind his back and head down as if he were looking for something he had lost. On the radio attached to the Nescafe stand, the morning Koran call came through and we sat in silence, enjoying the calm and quiet cool air, drinking our coffee.

I wish I was accepted here as part of the furniture more often, I thought.

England is under water and I am going camping next weekend, in England. I know I should be worrying about finding my wet-weather jacket but at this moment, I can't imagine what water falling from the sky is like.

There has been no rain in Dakar for nine months. When that rain did come, it wasn't much more than a trickle, what we call 'whisse' in Senegal , as opposed to 'taow', the big, thundering rain. Cotton farmers are suffering in the south, which means entire families go without a crop, the sale of which should, in a good year, sustain them throughout the 12-month period.

A friend told me that the reason it doesn't rain in Dakar anymore is because God has decided that it's not important for us to have water. There are no famers here anymore, he says, so why do we need rain?

I'm living the most priviledged of lives; I have a generator and a water pump, so I hardly ever have to go without water or electricity. I have very little to complain about. But I miss the rain, I miss water, I miss the smell of wet earth as the rain putters on the pavement and causes everyone to run for cover. I miss sitting on the balcony and watching the wild weather outside, rolling up my jeans to be able to cross the road, watching my flip-flop get caught in a whirl of flood-water as it gets taken to some unknown destination. I miss the wonderful release of a storm, the cool relaxing breeze in the clean, light skies that give you a moment to breath before the vast heat of the next build-up starts.



We have been waiting for a month for the rains now, and I have all but shut up shop. By 11am I am exhausted by the heat, until 8pm when I can start work again. If I eat at lunch time, I must sleep for two hours afterwards. When I was in Abidjan, which had been through the waiting period and was in the cool of the full rainy season, my friend said one afternoon, 'things are so much easier when it's not so hot' and she's right. The heat builds up and builds up so that you almost don't notice it happening. Just, one day you can no longer function. It takes a while to work out what's wrong with you and then you realise: nothing. It's just all part of waiting for the rains.

The Moulin Rouge

Leon is the parrot who lives in our building. He speaks French, he makes dog noises, he does the Moulin Rouge.



The Moulin Rouge is where he climbs up on to the top bars of the cage, holds on with his claws (paws?), throws his head back and swings his red tail feathers round and round in a circle. Just like a red windmill.



This afternoon, Papi (in the white hat), whose sole responsibility it is to look after the parrot, invited some kids in to play with Leon.



It's not the same as being able to go down the street and hang out with Now, but it is some sort of community. A parrot, a man who claims to be a hundred years old, and me.

"Ca c'est pas l'Afrique"

I was walking along the street. I was going to the bank. A man, in his thirties, dressed in a smart black shirt, was standing by a car and jangling a set of keys, as if he was going to get in and drive off.

"Bonsoir Madam," he said, and with one look I knew I didn't know him.

Before I could reply, because I almost always greet the strangers who greet me, he said, angrily, "So you don't recognise me huh?" and I walked on without replying.

Sometimes, it is true, you meet someone once, you chat briefly, you forget them, then you see them again somewhere totaly unconnected and they remember your name and what day you spoke, but you have no recollection of them. It is embaressing, but it happens.

I knew I didn't know this person, although he looked vaguely like my plumber, but he also didn't look like the kind of guy who hangs around in the market pulling this trick on every toubab who comes along, in the hope of getting an extortionate sale out of them. He was smart and he had a car. It was confusing.

I went to the bank. I returned, and as I was crossing the road, the same man came up from behind me, as if he'd been following me, and said, angrily,

"When you see someone you know, you greet them. It's like that in Africa."

Oh, right. That old chesnut. Look at the rude tourist who doesn't know how to behave with humanity and respect. She wasn't brought up properly. In Europe they're all rude anyway, no one talks to anyone else, and then they come here and they do the same to Africans. C'est pas comme ca en Afrique.

If it's one thing that drives me mad, it's being told how to behave properly by con-artists.

He tried to walk beside me, I tried to let him walk ahead, he tried one more time, I took refuge with a nice boy who was selling fake perfume, the guy went on. I watched him, as he watched me, take out a piece of carboard box and set it on the wall of the cathedral. He would sit and wait for his next target. Still wearing his best shirt, and jangling his car keys.

Living in a big city

Omar the tailor has been working overtime. At the moment Dakar is emptying itself of foreign workers; the UN lot have finished their contracts, the French are taking off for August. Omar knows that this is probably the busiest time of year and he doesn’t want to turn any work down so he’s working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.



This is also the time of year when 8-hour power cuts aren’t unusual. The other day I went down to the atelier to find out how the patchwork trousers were getting along and he was sitting at the back, silence around as machines lay dormant, fanning himself with a wicker hand fan.

I eventually took him to my flat, left him a key while I went out to a meeting, and let him work on my machine.



The trousers are finished, and are beautiful, and it’s not just me who thinks it.

Thursday night was the debut sortie of the trousers. I set out from my flat, through the cooling dusky streets, and walked down the main boulevard that leads to the presidential palace.

As I crossed the road, I saw one of Dakar’s crazy folk sitting in the road wearing only a ripped and dirty cloth around his waist. He had dreadlocks yet half of them had fallen out. He was dirty, grinning like a mad man, and holding his arm out towards me. Having just passed the group of wheelchair women who congregate on this road and wait for the lights to turn red so they can ask for money from the drivers who have nowhere to turn, I assumed he was holding his hand out for money too.

When I got closer, and smiled at him in place of giving him coins, I realised that the reason he was holding his hand out was not to collect coins, but to tell me, with a big thumbs-up and a crazy grin, that he liked my trousers.

*****

This morning, having been out till 5 listening to music, I wandered out of my flat in the midday sun to go and see how Omar was getting along with my tunic. It was hot, bright, and I hadn’t eaten.

Crossing the roundabout at the end of my road, a taxi crossed my path and stopped. The driver stuck his hand out to stop me.

I hate Dakar taxi drivers, I thought. You try and cross the road and if they don’t try to run you over, they stop in your path to try and get a fare out of you. I wasn’t in the mood.

Then I heard my name called. It was Sow, my taxi-man.

“Where are you going in this sun?” he called out, shaking my hand and laughing as another taxi sped by and nearly knocked me flying.

“I’m going to the tailor,” I replied in Wolof. Although Sow has worked in Dakar his whole like, he doesn’t speak a single word of French.

“Get in, I’ll take you,” he said, and we sped through the quiet Saturday streets, round the back of the bus station where the women and children have made a tentative home on its perimeters, their bright clothes hanging out to dry on the railings, to Omar’s shop. He dropped me off and drove away.

*****

I watched Omar piece together my tunic. We talked about setting up a proper atelier where he could work on his own. We talked about the patchwork trousers, how Cheikh Lo, musician and famous wearer of all things patchwork, had made me dance last night with him at his concert, delighted that I have at last joined the patchwork family. I drank some coffee from the toothy boy who pushes a Nescafe barrow around mixing up coffee and powdered milk into something almost delicious. I wandered around and talked to the other tailors.





I watched silly dancing on the TV with the rest of the guys as they took a break from their backbreaking work.



My friend Now sent me a message. ‘Madam, how is the morning, did you have a good repose?’.

Dakar takes and takes and takes. It so very rarely gives so much all at once.

Rays Bans

My friend Aziz told me today that the reason I lost my sunglasses over the side of the boat on Sunday was because I hadn't made any sacrifices to the sea. He said it was backpay for all the times I have been in the sea but not scattered any rice or sugar. Now I am at zero and must take a little bag of sugar with me every time I go from now on to make sure this doesn't happen again in another 6 years.

My mum told me the reason I lost my glasses over the side of the boat on Sunday is because I didn't attach them to a little cord around my neck.

I thought I had malaria so I went to the clinic to have a malaria test. It came back negative, so that's not the reason that I am tired the whole time and can only work till midday.

But while I was worrying that some horrid disease was incubating in my blood stream, I missed the signing of a contract between a big agricultural co-op and the government. It's not like I even knew about it: imagine that the man who deals with the press at the ministry would do something so helpful as to telephone me when big things like this are happening. That would make life too easy.

So yesterday morning, seeing that the rest of the news-wire world had covered the event, I rang around a few people to try to get information on the what and how of this deal. I read it three times in different newspapers, but being a thorough kind of journalist I needed to get the info from the horse's mouth. So in the heat of the midday sun, I went off the the ministry to speak to the person whose job it is to speak to the press about this information.

Arriving at the gate, I was met by a gruff guard.

"Who are you?" he growled.

"I am Rose Skelton," I said.

"What do you want?" he asked, and I told him I had a meeting with Mr So-and-So.

"Which country do you come from?" he barked, frowning from under his blue peaked cap.

What the hell difference does that make, I wanted to ask him.

"Ang-a-la-terre," I said in my Senegalese French.

"Oh, OK," he said, still not smiling, and let me through the gate.

I went up tp the guy's office. He wasn't there. A young man came to help me knock on the door, as if two people knocking would bring him back. I rang him on his phone.

"I'm coming!" he said, and then appeared a second later wearing a whilte boubou from the floor above. I was sweating at this point, wondering why government buildings always have a lot of expensive air-conditioning units but at the same time always leave the outside doors open.

I went into this gentleman's office. It was the typical scene, stacks of old newspapers, empty mineral water bottles balancing on top of the stacks, dog-eared and yellowing printed documents everywhere, a telephone somewhere on the desk, just the curled wire visible, an old computer, not switched on, and some cardboard files from which he started to hunt around for the document I needed.

I passed him my business card; he didn't give me on in return. "They've just run out," he lied.

I told him what I needed. Figures, and lots of them.

I knew at once from the far-away look in his eye he wouldn't give them to me, either because he didn't know them or he wasn't authorised. We had not written letters and had them stamped and legalised, so I was surprised that he had even agreed to see me.

He started to talk, to fend me off, to stop me from asking questions, to draw out the meeting so that I would go away and leave him alone.

"First the minister thanked the head of state, Maitre Abdoulaye Wade..." said my friend, telling me the gory details of the signing ceremony.

I let him ramble on, until he came to a pause, and I asked him how much the signing was for. At this point I had nothing I could publish.

"Well..." he said, uncertain.

"I saw in the newspaper that it was eighty million dollars," I said, hoping to help him out.

He jumped at the chance to throw me off completely.

"Ah ha! So you saw it in the papers. ALL the press was there yesterday so you can take it from them." He was speaking quickly now, knowing he had found the thing with which I could not argue.

I reminded him that not all the press was there. I was absent. I also reminded him that it was his job to tell me about these things. But looking around the room, realising he did not even know where his telephone was, I knew it was too much to ask that he do something like that.

"But I can't copy other people's work," I protested.

"Maybe we should call the director of the cabinet," was his next line. With which he started searching for the phone. On finding it minutes later and dialling all sorts of numbers, he eventually got through to the person who would be authorised to get authorisation to speak to me.

My man picked up my business card and mumbled into the phone that he had 'someone' (a journalist, I would have said) here who wanted information. What company is she from? Let me see...

"Rose....e-skelton...west.....Africa....corre-."

I stopped him. That was my title, not my company. I pointed to the name of my company written clearly beside my name. He gave a sharp jab with the phone as if I was intruding on his private space. I realised I had been rude, but then, well, this my chance to get the information I needed to get paid that day and he was ballsing it up left, right and centre.

I heard the man on the other end of the phone ask him to pass the receiver to me. I gave encouraging looks to show that I would behave well if he gave me the phone. My man resisted; the other man persisted. Finally, reluctantly, he gave me the phone.

"Which company are you from and where is it based?" asked the man on the other end of the phone directly and clearly.

I told him and he said,

"Fine. I will see what I can do. Give me your number and I will call you back."

Done. I handed the phone back. I knew he would never call me, but I liked this line of tact, it was better than the one that wasted everyone's time.

I went home without the information. I will never have it. I will never be invited to the next thing, unless I happen to hear it from another journalist. And I will probably never get used to working in this country.