"C'est une expérience"

Living as an American in Senegal is always challenging, but I feel like the past few days have been particularly...culturally enlightening. Life here can be chaotic, hot, dusty, and utterly frustrating at times. Some days, during the stiflingly hot walk back home from school I think that I might just snap at the next person who hisses at me to get my attention, the next cab that honks because they think that no white person would ever want to walk, the next talibe who shakes who holds out his hand and insistently asks for money. But I have found that I am pretty good at being tolerant - much to my surprise - by simply taking the attitude that no matter what irritating experience I have, it's an experience.

When we travel downtown to go the the Cape Verdean embassy only to find that it moved six months ago, then spend an hour wandering around the Corniche chatting with every embassy guard to figure out its location, it's another story to add to my journal. When the power goes out for twenty hour periods of time, it's another image to add to my mental scrapbook. When I realize that I don't know the name or relationship of the child who has been living in my home for almost a week now, it's another anecdote to tell my friend. It's Senegal, it's West Africa, it's different. I didn't come here for things to be the same.

But sometimes, this attitude is sorely tested. Today, my friends and I tried to travel to Cape Verde. We had booked hotels, we had planned transportation, we had a schedule of where we wanted to go. I think that was our first mistake. After getting up at 4 am - an ungodly hour in Senegal - and my host parents had driven us to the airport, we tried to check in. We found that our interactions with the air staff went something like this:

A: Asalaam malekum. Can we check in for the flight to Cape Verde here?
B: We don't have a final list of passengers yet. Wait over there.
20 minutes later:
A: Ca va? We want to check in for the flight to Cape Verde.
B: Cape Verde? Today? You want to go to Cape Verde today?
A (confused): Yes, our tickets are for the 7:30 flight today.
B (laughing): You aren't going on a flight to Cape Verde today. There's no plane leaving for Cape Verde.
A stares: Are you joking with us? I thought you said we were waiting on a list of passengers?
B (still laughing): No, it was cancelled a week ago. They should have contacted you. You can fly out tomorrow. Get a new voucher. By the way, do you have a husband?

The airport to begin with is an extremely stressful place. As soon as you leave the building, you are mobbed with people hissing and calling, "change argent? change argent?" or "you need taxi?" This atmosphere, combined with having slept very little, the fact that you know you are getting ripped off for the taxi but not feeling coherent enough to argue about it, and a general sense of frustration and disappointment, soon becomes very overwhelming. But it's an experience. A frustrating, irritating experience, but an experience nonetheless. C'est dommage, mais c'est Afrique, as my host mother said when all four of us dejectedly returned to my house. It's too bad, but that's Africa.

And as we laid in my bedroom after the family had gone to work or school, trying to figure out how we could spend our day, we tried to put it in perspective. We haven't spent much time exploring Dakar yet and we can start today. My towel wasn't dry anyway, now it has time to dry. I over-packed, now I can narrow down some of my clothes. It's frustrating, yes, but it's okay. And as we talked, we realized that even the weirdest, most annoying situations here turned out to be okay.

Though people here - either through aggression or obliqueness - can be the cause of the problem, they are always part of the solution. When the bakery didn't have change for the pastry I tried to buy, they told me instead that I could take it, and come back to pay when I could. When yesterday, we found ourselves in a sketchy situation walking home from school, a man stopped his car on the side of the highway and walked us for five minutes to our destination to make sure we got there okay. After our morning today, my host family made all four of us breakfast and suggested alternative ways we could spend the first day of our vacation, even if it wasn't in Cape Verde.

C'est Afrique.