all is well in your comfortable life and you cannot sleep most nights. so you move closer to the equator where the sun and the struggle knocks you flat on your back like a fallen goliath and your alarm clock is the bustle of the street waking up and an occasional early dawn riot.
Brew coffee and heat canned evaporated milk. Pour simultaneously into teacup. Add wild honey to taste.
Slice and toast baguette and slather on organic butter and marmalade, guava jam or hibiscus jelly. Or all three.
A renegade soldier is loose in Goma and Gaza Strip militants fire more rockets and Russia still refuses to pull back. In Dakar we lose power, blacking out the peninsula from Point E to Almadies, and now is a good time to remember your physics, in this universe true darkness does not (yet) exist, only varying levels of light. In any conflict or cave or refugee camp, even if your eyes can’t make them out, there are particles of luminescence. Hold on to that and have faith.
It’s true that no man is an island. Islands are feminine.
Île de Gorée sits 1 kilometre off the coast of Dakar, 17 minutes by ferry boat.
Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a fuurnu with a small packet of tea leaves and a full kas of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. Or, alternatively, the first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from kas to kas, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Return warga to fuurnu and bring back to a boil. Serve scalding hot. Second and third rounds add mint.
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
–CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
There are 10,000 talibes on the streets of Dakar, taken from their rural villages at a young age by a marabout, a Muslim religious leader with credibility elsewhere but in Senegal is using the ancient practice to exploit.
Talibes go barefoot onto the streets of Dakar to beg for their food and for money. If they do not bring a sufficient sum to the marabout at the end of the day they are beaten. They also are isolated in that they often can only speak their tribal language, of which there are 36 spoken in Senegal alone. Read more about them here.
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