Is it going to hurt?

Madeleine and I decided to take a break from the Yaakaar group and go visit the American International School of Dakar, a short 60 km drive north of M’bour (Yaakaar’s home base). Gisele, one of the group’s chaperone / accountant / coordinator / laundress / surrogate mother / nurse / dotting caregiver / fight referee / Pringles supplier / wine cellar keeper / coffee fetcher / supervisor came with us in an attempt to get to the bottom of her lost piece of luggage with South African Airlines. Gisele, a real trooper, had been wearing her daughter’s (who happens to be on the trip) clothing and t-shirts and teenager paraphernalia-ish pieces of clothing that only teenagers dare to wear. According to Gisele, it hadn’t been too bad, except for the time she went to the M’bour fish market wearing a I love Justin Bieber t-shirt and was attracting more attention from the fishermen than the fishermen’s fish were attracting flies. That in itself was enough to convince Gisele to go down to Dakar and give the friendly folks who fly the friendly skies of South Africa a piece of her mind.

Although Senegal is a few light years ahead of Guinea when it comes to everything (technology, organization, cleanliness, infrastructure), one must never forget that this tiny French colonial country, often referred to as ‘Africa Light’, is still, how can I say, Africa. Everything one does is done à la africaine (slowly, time consuming, needing much time and patience). Therefore, Madeleine and I knew that our little one day jaunt to Dakar would take much time and patience. Gisele, on the other hand, was in for a good ride.

We managed to find a taxi driver with whom it felt right to entrust him with our lives for the day. His name was Saliou, and his car appeared decent and reliable (clean and the doors open). It quickly became apparent to us that Saliou was a very able and adept driver as far as taxi driving goes. Who else do we know who can drive fast in typical African traffic (cars, trucks, donkey drawn carts, people selling an array of wares on the road, occasional goat, the occasional traffic cop standing around doing everything thing traffic cops do except directing traffic, etc), and engage in a multitude of other engaging taxi driver related activities (talking to the passengers, constantly talking to someone on a cell phone, constantly adjusting the temperature of the car’s AC that doesn’t work, constantly opening and closing the car windows with the automated electronic thingy that doesn’t work, scratching oneself, adjusting the radio, ...you know, all the stuff that a driver education instructor would tell you not to do when you learn how to drive back home in Canada.

After telling Saliou the itinerary of the day, we set off for our excursion to Dakar. We reached the outskirts of Dakar within 90 minutes, which according to Saliou, was record time. Dakar traffic is similar to Conakry traffic, except not as colourful. Not as many goats on the freeway, and no disabled guys in wheelchairs sharing the freeway with cars. Lots of cars and trucks belching fumes and blaring cacophonic noises (muffler?…what’s that?) making their way down a motorized ribbon of steal and duct tape (yes, duct tape seems to be the material of choice for car repair here in Africa). Pollution at its grandest!

Madeleine chose to sit in the front with Saliou so as not to get car sick, and I shared the back seat with Gisele, being entertained by her constant and frequent whimpers and yelps of astonishment and fright as she was taking in the spectacle of rush hour traffic in Africa and by Saliou’s daring yet gifted driving skills. “How the heck can you stay so calm!?” she asked. “You get used to it”, I replied.

After awhile, Saliou turns to me in the back seat (yelp of horror from Gisele) and asked me where the American school was located? Of course I knew where the American school was, I had Googled it the night before, and I knew it was right beside route nationale 1, just before the road to the airport. Funny how directions to someplace in a Google search seems clear and precise on the computer screen, but not when you’re sitting in a taxi, stuck in rush hour morning traffic in a 2 million+ city in Africa where addresses for some odd reason don’t exist. Mind you, I’ve become pretty adept at giving directions to taxi drivers in Conakry (past the two guys urinating on the No Urinating signs, turn left at the goat standing on the heap of garbage, then another left at the lady bathing in the ditch, etc). But Dakar isn’t Conakry, and Saliou didn’t seem to be too impressed with the result of my Google search. His look of confusion warranted a bit of cause for concern on my part and a rather loud yelp of fright from Gisele.

Saliou decided to edge his way to a traffic cop who was standing on the freeway island, doing again what traffic cops do, observe traffic and occasionally blowing his whistle out of boredom. He stopped the car right in front of the cop, ignoring the traffic that was whizzing left and right around our car. I asked him what he was doing and he replied that he was going to ask the gendarme if he could make an illegal U Turn on the freeway. “For a price?”, I asked. “Of course,” he said.

A few minutes and Francs later, we were heading in the opposite direction of the gridlock and heading to …no one knew. Saliou informed me that he knew of a short cut. I turned to Gisele, who by that time was semi unconscious, and asked her in English (so as not to let Saliou in on the fact that I was starting to question his driving navigation skills) how can we be taking a short cut to someplace we did not know how to get to? Gisele did not have an answer for me.

After a while, Saliou did something which was totally out of character for someone of his gender…he decided to ask someone for directions. Perhaps not a bad idea under the circumstances, except for the fact that : a) he stopped in the middle of the freeway, b) the car stalled and he couldn’t get it started again, b-i) the car had flooded, b-ii) the battery was dead.

Jokingly, and to Gisele’s horror, I asked if he wanted us to get out and push. Without hesitating, he replied, “yes, if we didn’t mind.” Madeleine, Gisele, and I instantly opened our car doors, made our way to the back of the car, cars and trucks honking and whizzing past us, and proceeded in pushing the car, all the while, laughing our guts out, knowing that this would certainly be something to write home about, and, perhaps, in twenty years from now, if ever we survived this, we would talk to our grandchildren about this moment of our lives.

Suddenly, a big puff of smoke burst out of the dangling exhaust pipe of the car. Halleluiah, we were back in business. We successfully managed to get back into the refuge of the car, to a smiling and relieved driver. Saliou took the next off ramp to a more sedate part of Dakar and eventually, after 5 or 6 ‘leave the motor running’ stops to ask for directions, we managed to find the American school.

Although our trip to Dakar was, to say the least, eventful, our trip back to M’bour that afternoon would prove to be as, if not more exciting. About 20 kms from M'bour, the car started to overheat. Turned out that the radiator, which had recently been ‘fixed’, was busted again and had voided all of its water. On a road in the middle of the sub-Saharan desert, under the stifling heat of the mid-day sun, it didn’t take long before our radiator hoses had melted away to a black mass of burnt rubber…get the picture? Three white people and a black guy standing in front of an open-hooded fuming car, stranded in the middle of nowhere on the side of the highway…now what?

Occasionally, cars stopped to offer help which really meant more black guys joining us in observing a fuming car. What were the chances of someone having a spare radiator hose in the trunk of his car? Well…one car did stop, and it just happened that the guy was one of Saliou’s friend who had recognized him in passing. Did he have a spare radiator hose in the trunk of his car. It sure seemed like that by the way Saliou’s face lit up. Dream on. No spare radiator hose, but the next best thing…a piece of rope, a piece of big, frayed rope. We would be towed, not only to the next town where the car could be fixed and which, in our minds, appeared to be the most logical thing to do, but all the way to M’bour, which was over 20 kms away.

For the next hour, we were towed at hair raising speed down the highway, occasionally stopping to retie the rope that had given way, passing these caravans of slow moving humungous trucks. Gisele’s frequent yelps of fright that I had grown accustomed to that morning were replaced by an extended drawn out grunt of pain, as if she was imagining what it would feel like when we would be wedged or stuck in between one of those humongous trucks. Madeleine, on the other hand, sitting in the front seat, did not budge an inch, and seemed to be oblivious to the fact that we were in harms way. I was impressed with her composure. Turns out, as she later confessed once her speech came back, her calm demeanour and behaviour was more of a trauma induced state of comatose. She was trapped in a frozen body yet her mind was racing along the same line as Gisele’s and mine…Is it going to hurt when we die?

To end this blog on a positive note, suffice it to say that we did end up back in M’bour, safe and sound, our nerves understandably shot, shattered, and frayed like that piece of rope, but happy and relieved that we would all, inshallah, have grandchildren one day. Life continued, planet earth continues to revolve around the sun, and we had fish again that night for supper. The sun set on another eventful day in Africa, and one day we will be able to tell all of our grandchildren about the time we pushed a car on a Dakar freeway.