Home is Where the Clean Toilet is

Yesterday was the wrong day for my camera battery to die. In the morning, Oulèye and I slept in for the first day since I’ve been here (well, aside from the day I was sick last week). At 1:00, Mbacke came and picked us up for lunch, which was, as usual, delicious. We’ve had lunch there three days now, and each time it’s been a dish of rice with fish and a very tasty, spicy sauce; one day we had Thiboudienne. Afterwards, Oulèye was tired, so she went home to rest and later pay a visit to a friend who happens to live down the street. Mbacke took me on a tour of Mbour and Saly. First we drove through Mbour on a circuitous route of dirt roads and houses. Soon enough we were in Saly, the neighboring town. Saly is markedly more touristic than Mbour, and, if I do say so, also a bit more pleasing to the eye.

I could not believe the quantity of hotels and rental houses and huts and villas in Saly! They seemed to stretch on for miles and miles. They are all immaculately maintained, with flowers and vines everywhere. We stopped at one, Hotel des Bouganvilles, named for all the flowers in the expansive courtyard among the hotel suites. We walked through the yard, past all the flowers, weaving through the buildings. There was not a soul in sight. The hotel appeared completely void of tourists. We continued on, where we came out by an immaculate pool. I wanted to jump in so badly, but I hadn’t planned for it. We continued on and soon enough we were at the beach. The sand was a light brown, just like all the sand that makes up the roads here. A few Senegalese teens were swimming and playing around in the ocean. The water was the perfect temperature. We walked back up to the hotel, and took a different route through the bouganvillia-lined paths, and we ended up on the property of the adjacent hotel, Hotel Amarylis. It, too, was completely devoid of tourists. Not a soul in sight. Mbacke explained that tourist season doesn’t start until October, and ends in March. The hotels are almost all foreign-owned—Swiss, French, Dutch, and Spanish investors.

We left the hotel haven and continued on the road back towards Mbour, but not without making a stop at another cove of Saly’s beach. Here there were tons and tons of kids playing on the beach—the vast majority of them boys. Mbacke told me that when they have enough money (about 60,000 CFA, or $130 USD) they do educational events and condom distribution here on the weekends. Due to limited funds, they can only do this once a trimester. We walked up the beach, which itself was sprinkled with dead blow fish, shells, and jellyfish, and not a little bit of trash, though Mbacke tells me the beach there is cleaner than most. As we walked along, I saw an amazing scene—a boy bathing his horse in about 4 feet of surf. The horse seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly. After the bath was over, the horse turned around and walked in towards the shore, and the boy grabbed on to his tail and rode the waves back to the sand. This is a common practice here.

We turned around and got back into the car, and Mbacke drove me to the fish market in Mbour, which was about a mile down the shore. There I got an informal tour of the market. I can’t remember the dozens of names of fish that I saw there. The place was so packed—with fisherman, women cleaning fish, making fish balls, people sorting fish, packing fish, etc. The CCA does events here, too, money permitting. The port was divided into sections for small fish, large fish, and massive fish, rays, squid, octopi, and crustaceans—the latter varieties destined for export to Europe, China, and Japan.

After the fish market, we went to a music spectacle put on by a group of Catholic school teachers with whom the CCA collaborates from time to time. It was held in an outdoor community center. There were about 5 different percussionists, two guitarists, a male singer, a female singer, and a guy mixing the sound. The sound was way too loud, and I was tempted to plug my ears at times. People would go up and dance in front of the crowd periodically, which was always fun to watch, and one small kid, maybe about 2 years old, would go up and dance, too. I cannot express how cute this kid was. He later found a loose cord dangling from a tent, and took it in his hand, as if to mimic the woman with the microphone and cord. Watching this kid mimic the singers and shake his little booty provided for a source of endless laughter.

Today was my first day at the Centre de Communication pour les Adolescents (CCA). Mbacke had a meeting in Thiès with the World Bank and IMF for a quarterly review of the CCA’s HIV/AIDS testing and awareness-raising program, so he dropped us off at the office and made his way there shortly thereafter. The office itself is housed in the CDEPS building, a section of the Ministry of Youth dedicated to sports. For this reason, there is a constant drone of kids playing basketball on the other side of the wall. The huge empty room in the entrance to the building that first made me believe it to be unoccupied turns out to be the gymnastics room. Mats are set up daily and gym coaches hold classes there in the afternoons. Putting the CCA in the CDEPS building allows the center to avoid stigmatizing itself as a place of reproductive health activity (a taboo topic in the plurality of social circles here), and in this way, kids can enter the building freely under the guise of going for sports, without being judged by passersby outside the building.

The CCA office space itself consists of a series of modest rooms for each of the personnel: the Coordinator (Mbacke), the sage-femme, or midwife, the social worker (a position currently unoccupied due to lack of funding; this office is thus occupied by interns), and the IEC Technician (Information, Education, et Communication; this person is in charge of outreach activities). When we opened the door to the Assistante Sociale’s office, the space we will be occupying for the next two weeks, we were confronted by a great deal of dust and sand, as the office has been unoccupied since the last intern left in May (she was an undergrad social work student from Belgium). The office has no window, but the door opens to the courtyard, and there is a small rotating fan mounted on the ceiling. Mbacke cleaned the desk and chairs off for us, and we turned on the fan and got settled in. We spoke briefly with the IEC Technician before diving into the evaluations. We read for about a half hour in the balmy, dusty office before the power cut out, leaving us to read for three more hours in the dim, dusty, hot space. This is character-building!

Lunch is usually from 1:00 to 3:00, but Oulèye and I were both famished and tired by 11:30, so we left at noon for lunch, (we usually go home with Mbacke for lunch, but since he was in Thiès, we ventured out) and ended up at a restaurant a few blocks from the office. They had two dishes to offer us, one of them sounding strangely familiar…gumbo! Surely, I thought, this is not the gumbo I know as a native Louisianne. But, to my surprise, they brought out a plate of rice accompanied by a spicy stew of seafood! Gumbo it was. It was a small sign of how little bits of West African culture are still present in the U.S. today.

Oulèye said she would go home for prayer, and I wanted to go home as well to get some water (and use the bathroom…that’s another story) and put some snacks in my bag for the afternoon at the office. We caught a taxi back home, and got the driver’s number so we could call him to pick us up later to take us back to the office. At 1:45, I packed my bag up and asked Oulèye for the number of the driver so we could make our way back to the office. She said, “we don’t go back until 3:00.” I replied that since we had left an hour early, I thought we would go back an hour early. She said, “If you go back to the office now, no one will be there.” I wasn’t really inclined to take the taxi alone and then show up and be locked out for an hour, but I also didn’t want to stay an hour late at the office to make up for a three hour lunch. I ended up staying home with Oulèye and reading there for another hour. We called the driver a little before 3:00 to come pick us up; he said he was eating lunch and would be there soon. We waited a half hour before calling again; Oulèye said he was far away and that we should walk to find another taxi. We left our house and walked 15 minutes to the main road. By the time we got there, I was sweating from the heat, covered in dust, and grumpy from trekking my laptop and all the evaluations around on my back. We got to the main road and bargained for at taxi, and I marveled at how happy I was to be in the hot, dirty clunker, with the breeze on my face, on our way back to the office… four hours after we had left for lunch.

We got back to the office and I bought a liter of water, dehydrated from our brief walk in the sun with my backpack. At the kiosk, I conversed with an old man, each of us doing our best with our less-than-perfect French. We were the only ones back at the office, as it turned out. After another hour or so of reading evaluations, a group of teens came into the office. They were searching for educational materials on unintended pregnancy for a class assignment. We did our best to help find the appropriate brochures since we were the only ones at the center. As the kids made their way out, one young man lingered behind, and gestured that he wanted to speak with me. He asked Oulèye if he could meet with me alone. She agreed, and stepped out in the hall to talk to the other teens. The boy asked me if he could have some condoms. I turned around and looked at the locked cabinet behind my back, and apologetically informed him that I didn’t have the key. He looked disappointed, and I was just as disappointed that I couldn’t help him out. A minute later, after the kids had left, I noticed a box on the floor by the desk…what if? I opened it, and sure enough, it was filled with condoms. I debated for a minute whether to run out and catch up with the kids; I wanted to help the kid out, but discretion and confidentiality were critical, too. What’s more, I wasn’t sure of the CCA’s protocol for condom distribution. Surely the kids have to receive instruction on their appropriate use when they’re distributed, and I know they also record data on the recipient’s age and gender at the time of distribution. Oulèye and I pondered together as to whether we should track him down; she remarked that we wouldn’t want to be the ones responsible if he has unprotected sex. I thought to myself, however, ultimately, he’s responsible for his own actions. I walked outside to see if they were there, but they were gone. Tomorrow I’ll ask Mbacke what the best thing to do is when kids ask us for condoms in the absence of the other staff.

After having well-hydrated myself, I needed to make a trip to the toilettes. I remembered Oulèye commenting on their filthy state, but I was in no position to wait two hours until we went home. I have never regretted drinking water so much as when I saw that bathroom. Mbacke had told us they can only afford for the center to be cleaned every month or so, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the most filthy toilet I’ve ever seen in my life; I think the cinematographer from Trainspotting must have derived his inspiration from this toilet. It was covered in a thin, suspicious brown film inside and out, and had black water inside—I would later discover there were mosquitoes breeding in the stagnant “water”! The surrounding area was dirty as all hell, too. I’m not sure how I’ll manage my simultaneous hydration and avoidance of the bathrooms at the CCA for the next two weeks.

After our first day, I was happy to come home and use our clean toilet and make a cup of tea and eat a croissant, thinking about our methodology. As I sit here typing this, I’m waiting out the second power outage of the day. Hopefully this one will be less than the three and a half hour outage earlier today…my computer is about to die.