24 days to go until the big swim.
Here's a picture of my local hair dresser in Dakar.
Swimming for an hour somehow manages to take up four hours of my time. On Tuesday, Naomi and I braved the office of the lady who sells the season tickets for the pool. We were directed and re-directed from one door to the next, barred from entering the door we needed on the basis that the guard there had the power to bar us, until we found the Lady Who Can.
She sat at her desk shuffling through bits of paper, a fan whirring in the corner of the room. We handed over the 15,000 Cfa (£15) for ten swims and she handed us a receipt. We thought that would be it, but no, we must come back the next day to collect our cards. This all took half an hour.
So today we went back, hoping to collect our cards and never see her again. She shuffled through an envelope of cards, ever so slowly, and then looked at us over her glasses and said, no, our cards weren't ready yet. When we asked her what possibly there was to do that couldn't be done in a second, she said that each little card had to be signed by the director of the swimming pool and that he was away 'on mission' which is Senegalese speak for, gone on holiday, doesn't have time for signing bits of paper, or just that no one has got around to handing him the papers to sign.
She said we might like to come back tomorrow and I asked if the director would be back tomorrow. No, she said. Maybe Tuesday. I asked what the point would be in coming back tomorrow then and she barked that I had only had to come there once before, as if wasting half an hour trying to get past the guard and through the doors to find her office every single time I wanted to swim wasn't a waste of time.
The bureaucracy of this place is stifling, suffocating, and at times I just can't bear it. It's there to justify the existence of people like Madam Swimming Tickets and must make people like Monsiuer Director feel like he's drowning under a pile of millions of little cards.
Well, I swam a km and a half and bought myself a nice red swimming hat. Then my swimming buddies and I went out for lunch and by the time we had got back home (after taking the wrong bus) four hours had been eaten up.
Well, luckily I hadn't hoped to do any work today because yesterday my day was stressful and tiring enough and I thought I would take the day off. I was out interviewing young men about their attempts to take the wooden fishing boats to the Canary Islands, and it involved driving up and down through the swealtering suburbs of Dakar trying to find people who would talk to me about how they would rather die than stay in this country. They all told me the same thing: we need work. Not work so they can buy fancy cars, but work that will bring in just £90 a month so they can feed their families.
It was a very sobering day and reminded me of what my friend Now told me this week, that I know nothing about Senegal and the suffering of people here. I have young male friends who would be too proud to show me how they feel at not having work- we sit and drink tea and play music and it gives you the impression that everything is OK, that there's no work but there is always a bowl of rice to be found somewhere. But I saw another side, and I felt sad.
So my long-running battle with the apartment rental agency over the separation of our water meters is coming to an end- I feel the end is nigh. For the last year I've been sharing the water bill with the evil woman who lives downstairs, who is not the kind of woman to turn taps off when she's not using them. She has a washing machine AND two full-time maids (for only three of them). After many months of visits to the agency and the water company, today we received the papers which say we can have our own water meter. All we have to do is go and pay £14 to the water company to sign up.
"Plus £5 for transport," said Djibi, our rental agent as he stood in the apartment with some coiffed woman lurking in the background.
"What transport?" I aked.
"You know, transport, to speed things up..."
A bribe, then.
It's not the money, and I know first hand how slow things can be if you don't bribe, (three visits to the electricity company to get my name on the electricity bill), but I am morally against bribing and I feel cross that I have to do it. To say that everyone does it so you have to do it too is not a reason- it's just a self-serving act to serve the greedy, filling the pockets of the people who already have jobs.
So do I carry on for three more months waiting for the papers or do I pay the money and get it done in a Senegalese instant?
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