Five times a day across the arm of Dakar and throughout Senegal, Muslims take down their holy beads and unroll their prayer mats toward Mecca. I awake to start my day more leisurely, getting up to heat water on the kerosene burner and sitting on the balcony with my devotional. Senegal is 94 percent Islamic and is tolerant of the remaining 6 percent, comprised mostly of tribal animists and various missionary groups. After being shocked awake by a cold shower (water heaters are an ill-afforded luxury here), I eat. Breakfast is water and powdered milk, boiled and mixed into tea, a baguette with chocolate hazelnut spread or Kiri cheese and some fruit, usually guava or oranges.

This is Saturday and my to-do list has only two errands, but in Senegal, it will take me most of the day to complete. The list reads 1) fish market 2) laundry. It’s a pace I’ve missed during my time living in Austin. Now, after more than 20 years, I’m back in Senegal, and it feels as though I’ve never left.
The street awakens in a rush of noise as the vendors set up their wares. Sheep baaa for home, sharing the road with the first of the traffic. At the port of Soumbédioune, fishing boats start to come in with the dawn, their crews tiredly triumphant, for today the market will have fish. I jostle with the crowds for a place in line as restaurant owners write up their lunch special and the days catch is made into Ceebu Jën, a delicious platter of fried rice, fish and olives, cabbage, carrots and manioc, perfected in Senegal. Ceebu Jën is served best with bissap, the red, cold national tea made from hibiscus petals and sugar.

The sky is vibrant now, with orange hues suggesting coming winds and dust storms. Mauritania makes us a gift of the Sahara desert, a few meters a year. Leaving the market, I flag down a car rapid, a brightly decorated minibus that costs anywhere from a quarter to a dollar to veer dangerously between points on the peninsula. Fifteen minutes later, I bang on the side to signal my stop and hurry home to start the laundry, every piece of clothing scrubbed and wrung by hand in cold water and rinsed and hung to dry on the roof. Dakar is one city at street level and another on the flat rooftops, where friends gather under the stars and mattresses are placed when the night is hot and entire gardens are grown in old tires. People live and love and die on Dakar rooftops.

While the sun does its bit on the dresses and slips, I light the fuurno to make hot coals for the iron. Electricity is in short supply here; it’s very expensive and cuts off in varying districts several times a day, sometimes for up to 10 hours a stretch. Still, it’s more than the villages have, where the solar panels and generators might provide power for a few hours a day. I call down to a pushcart vendor and buy a coffee, spiced, sugared and scalding hot, and beignets fresh out of the peanut oil. I buy the same for a huddle of Talibés, child beggars. There are more than 10,000 of them in Dakar. Life is hard here, and there is never enough food, water, coal, electricity or fuel, never enough necessities and no shortage of work and need.

But Africa too has so much beauty. Dakar, with its flowering Jasmine trees and hibiscus-lined streets and white-washed cottages surrounded by the sea. There is plenty of Attaya, a hot friendship tea taken in a three-round ceremony as a celebration of life, the bitter and the sweet. And most of all, I am humbled by the grace and beauty of the people of this land. The Senegalese are very proud of their hospitality; the Teranga, they call it. And here hospitality is perfected. On any given tropical night, there is music drifting from a rooftop, an impromptu soccer match could spring up or you might be asked to take tea. I feel at home amid the cacophony of traffic, the bleat of lambs, the laughter and shouts of children over the crashing of the ocean. The call to prayer. The scent of jasmine. Playing futbol in the dusk.

They say you can never go back, and they are right. Dakar has changed so much since my childhood. But still I know so much more about myself these last few months. Learned that many of my habits are African, my rhythm and heartbeat are Senegalese. I’ve never felt so normal. Never even realized how out of place I usually felt until experiencing the absence of it. The weird of Austin must miss me just a little. I definitely miss you, too.
Published in Austin Monthly Magazine, March 2009

And this is why I came here, to be out of my element. To live in a place where it would take real commitment to be complacent. The frustrations pale next to the payoffs, when things I agonized over in my last life, things I tossed and turned and petitioned, some of those thank God are but shadows of dreams.