I have a new project on the go. This here is my friend Now that I talk about all the time. If I was 11 I would say he was my best friend. He owns the boutique in my street, the little blue shed he's sitting beside. We've decided he needs to make some changes to it, and he's applying for a loan to expand it plus pick it up and turn it 90 degrees so that he has more room for people to sit there. Because a corner shop (which is the British equivalent) is much more than somewhere to buy a baguette. It's the community centre, neighbourhood watch, club house, place to leave the keys, and much more. It's where I go when I want to eat my meal with friends, it's where I go when I need someone to translate a song for me for an article (because at Now's boutique I think there are about 7 language groups represented), it's where I go when I need a plumber, carpenter or painter.
But the one major flaw in the design of Now's shop is that it's metal and there's no shade near it. So at the moment, in the 35 degree heat, we all hide in the shade of the wall of the house opposite and talk about how lovely it would be if there was a tree to sit under.
At the moment, my garden is blooming. On my two metre squared balcony I have all sorts of succulents and creepers and bloomers going on, plus my basil and bonsai baobab tree, but soon I'm going to be in London and there'll be no one to look after them. One of the things that bonded Now and I was the way he looked after my basil plants when they were tiny and I had gone away to Guinea. He talked to them every day, gave them water, and when I came back they had grown almost out of control. Now I know that he understands what I mean when I say "look after them"- it's not just giving them a pint of water the day before I come back so the soil feels wet when I touch it.
One of my newest aquisitions is a frangipani tree. When I lived in Australia I developed a fascination with this flowering tree and one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me was to send me a birthday present, a huge box full of gifts, the bottom of which was lined with frangipani flowers. Ever since then I've dreamed of growing one myself. Well, you can't move to the tropics and then not grow strange tropical plants so on my balcony is a gorgeous green frangipani tree, small for the moment, but growing fast. It seems happy somehow- perhaps because the leaves grow so fast that they are always a glowing green- but I get good vibes from it. When the discussion of planting the tree at the boutique came up I thought, what better than to plant my happy frangipani in my street where it will give shade to my friends and have the space to grow big and wide and bloom with flowers? And so the preparation has begun for planting my first ever tree.
Now dug the hole and together he and I went off the the man who sells plants by the side of the road, at the bottom of the lighthouse hill. He sold us a cement sack of rich soil for 50 pence but when we tried to carry what must have been 50 kilos home, the sack split and Now and I spent a very funny half an hour trying to carry the bag whilst keeping the rips face-up. Now eneded up carrying it on his back. Now we will wait one week for the soil to do whatever it has to do and then we will plant the tree.
I should say though that Now has doubts that it will give us enough shade. A mango would be better, but, says Now, mango's are very lazy trees and in the ten years of having a mango tree at his house in Casamance, he has never once seen a mango on it. An acacia would be better, but we're not sure where to find one and they produce such horrible spikes that we would surely be being pricked left right and centre from its thorns. So the frangipani it is.
Last night we got our electricity back at about 8pm so that was when I started my afternoon's work. I worked until midnight and then went to see an excellent band, Moussa Diouf, a Senegalese jazz bass gitar player who's on tour here from France. He and his guitarist sidekick, Herve Samb, have got everybody talking- it's Richard Bona meets Santana, via Senegal, and it's excellent. I'm taking photos at the moment for the seminar I'm giving on west African music and my work in Senegal at the most excellent Selam Music Festival in Stockholm in early November because I want to be able to show people what the scene's like here. This is the stage at Just 4 You, which I grant you sounds like something you might find on the front of a Korean notebook, but it's one of the best places to see live music in Dakar, with gigs every night of the week, mostly featuring from big names like Omar Pene and Cheikh Lo.
Scooting around the corner to Pen Art Jazz, another excellent live music venue, I bumped into my friend, the manager, who insisted that we go to Dakar's newest nightclub, a place called Nirvana where I was, of course, totaly under-dressed and felt like someone's Aunt. After paying about what I spend on my month's rent on a bottle of wine and dancing to 'Holiday' (remember that?), I thought we were going home (it was 4.30 am) but I was mistaken, we were actually going to Ngalam, a really old school disco where I felt much more at home in my jeans and t-shirt and danced wildly to Ivorian music. After that it was dibi, the Senegalese equivalent of a kebab shop- a hole in the wall place with guys standing around in butcher's overalls stoking an enormous wood fire and raking meat by the kilo on a grill above it. The owner, a big mama in a purple flowery dress, dealt with the drunks galantly in the only the way a mama can, and we ate wonderful grilled meat until it started raining and the sun came up and it was time to go home.
And so there's been no swimming today either and there's only 9 days to go before I have to face my demons.
I've been trying to figure out if we have an equivalent event here in Sierra Leone, but I think the closest is the great Pothole Dodge, a daily event.
ReplyDeleteBest of luck and watch out for thosee black plastic bags.