There has been an unsaid rule between me, my closest neighbor, and the volunteer in Fode Bayo before me, about travel in and out of my village. Unless you want to get screwed over and/or stuck in a random village, finish all of your traveling by 4pm.
Being 18k into the bush, if you’re coming from Kolda to our road town of Dabo and it gets too late, you’ll end up biking through the bush in the dark, and then silly things happen like you toppling over on your velo, which causes your back pack to bust, all of your food and gifts for Tabaski to spill out, and inevitably your wallet to grow legs and hop away deep into the bush so that you will never be able to find it or your cell phone again.
Usually, the alhum (bus) rides from Dabo to Kolda aren’t too bad. Sure they can range between an hour fifteen to three hours, but I guarantee you that if you choose to catch a bus at 4pm or later, it will most definitely stop at every village en route to Kolda, break down twice, stop for 45 minutes at Sarre Sara (a village only 20k from Kolda!), and/or you’ll be sitting between two big smelly people in an aisle with no windows. No really, I promise this will happen.
Really, it’s just best to catch a car from Kolda to Dabo no later than 3, and to leave Dabo no later than 4. You think I would know this by now, or at least adhere to the lessons.
Today, around 3:27pm, I was going over my schedule for the next few days, when I came upon my pepeniere project for early next week. Shuffling through my rice sack of bags of seeds, tree sacks, and jars of seeds, I realized: shit, I don’t have enough lucena for the village-wide tree-nursery fest. Ok quick thinking… I currently have a mill five to my name (a scoch over $3) but the manduat (quarterly PC “allowance”) just came into the banks in Kolda, and I don’t have anything scheduled until Saturday morning… if I leave right now now, I can make it to Dabo and get to Kolda before it gets dark. [cue not pausing to review the plans] Ok sounds good.
Then I remembered that I have to bring a 20lb clay pot/jar thing my moms make (called a cannary, we use it to hold water – what I called my fridge in my village video) to the new volunteer in my road town, since we forgot to put it in the CAR when we actually had a CAR in my village… one of the two times out of the year when a CAR comes to my village. Anyway. Strapping the thing to my bike to be sure it wouldn’t crash to the ground during the ride took fifteen minutes, two blankets, an old bowl, and two rubber straps. Then I’m off. It’s 4pm at this point. I decided to leave and surge forward with the increasingly mental plan anyway.
Get to Dabo, stop at Dave’s hut to drop off my bike and the cannary, then walk up to the paved road to wait for a car. None in sight, but my friend who makes beans every morning for breakfast (it’s a big breakfast item here) Sadio the bean lady, is walking by and tells me that her daughter just had a baby and that I should come see. Check my watch – 5:43. Check the road – no buses or cars in sight. So, sure, I decided, let’s go see the little bobo debo (baby girl in Pulaar).
6:02 I emerge and assume my normal car waiting spot on the road amongst the usual small talk with the locals. Still no car. Well, no car or bus from the direction I need them to be going.
Then, a bus coming from Kolda does a u-turn and stops as if they were going into Kolda. 6:23. Yes! I think. Sun goes down around 7:10, gets really dark by 7:40, I could still make it to Kolda in time. So I walk up to the bus, about to get in, when the dudes tell me they’re not going to Kolda, but staying in Dabo for the night. UGH. Who stays in Dabo for the night that drives a car? I’ll tell you, no one.
Grumbling, I cross the street. 6:25. If no cars come by 6:30 I’m staying at Dave’s and leaving first thing in the morning, I tell myself. 6:27 people start getting into the bus that’s “staying in Dabo.” I get up to investigate and surprise – they’ve decided to leave. 6:29 the engine gurgles to life and we roll away. Yes! I think settling in to my sweaty seat. As long as we continue moving, we’ll get to Kolda tonight.
As said, it’s common for these buses to make frequent stops along the road to Kolda in order to pick up passengers, drop off passengers, or to collect items to be sold from one town to another. Thus, at first I thought nothing of our stopping in a village about 9k from Dabo. Until the driver turned the engine off instead of idling (never a good sign). Hissing through their teeth (sign of dislike), we get off the bush and sit around the side of the road, as the village kids come out to see if any of us are amusing. Aaaand score! A toubab, always good for fun. Trying to ignore the seventeen little heads in front of me, I ask the driver what we’re waiting for. “Another car. It’s coming from Dabo. Then we will leave.”
Sure, I thought. Knowing the Senegalese habit, if he says it’s in Dabo (9k away) it’s definitely then in Jaobe (30+k away). So I settle into my bench, watching the sun set lower and the minutes on my watch click by. Serves you right, I think. See what happens when you try to leave at night? By 7:15 I’m decently annoyed, but too fatigued to really do much about it. A car rolls up and stops, and when the driver tells me to take the car instead, I dismiss any questions about the situation, grab my bag, and squish into the back row of the overgrown station wagon for eight.
Well, though I had to wait, this may not be so bad, I decided. These littler cars move decently faster than the buses, and our car was full, meaning it most likely would not be stopping before we hit Kolda. I settle into my seat as the old dude next to me squishes me against the wall and catch up on my text messaging, trying to think of amusing things until we cover the 43k to Kolda.
We actually cruised along quite well, even in the part of the road that’s a checker-board of pot holes (which also signals that you’re getting really close to Kolda. Irony at it’s best I assure you, as the pot holes require your car to slow to an inching pace while you’re less than 10k from the city.). Then, the driver skids to a quick stop, says something in Wolof, and everyone but me and the lady in the row in front of me get out of the car. I try to sit for a few minutes, but the car becomes increasingly muggy and stuffy so I venture out.
Oh hey, we have a flat! A part of me is actually impressed, because I didn’t feel the flat at all while we were driving or pulling to a stop. This is saying something, as I have been in many cars with flats, and two cars where a tire has simply popped off and bounced along the road, off to a better land than the car it was hardly hold up. 43 minutes go by as the driver and the dudes in the car finagle the lifty thing under the car (only to have it slam down three times before it actually managed to keep the body up), pulled the old tire off, smushed on the new one, and screwed all the bolts on. I pretended I was helping by shining my cell phone flash light on the whole situation (cell phones have little LED flashlights here! For serious, it’s better than interwebs on your phone… if you’re living in Senegal), but I doubt as to whether anyone benefited from my “aid.”
Standing around as the tire was fit into place, I looked again at my watch and the situation around me (pitch dark hold for the full moon, middle of bush territory right before the city, too far to walk, but not really near anything) and was amazed that I wasn’t more pissy/angry/frustrated/grumpy. I actually felt more in a state of zen, calmly watching everything, going along as things happened, and thinking about showering the dirt I could now roll of my skin in little columns of black grime once I got into Kolda. Could I be getting more patient? Patience has never been a virtue of mine, and though everyone says the peace corps makes one more able to stand patience, I doubted it would work for me. But in that moment… maybe! I thought. Now, I can assure you that my zen-state was more of a fatigue-state of complacency rather than anything resembling a yin and a yang. But either way, eventually we bumbled along into Kolda, stopped at a random street, moved from the car to a cab in one motion, and mumbled a half-awake diatribe to the cab driver in Mandinka about how shitty the car was that I just emerged from. (You can do this in cabs in Kolda because they all know where the young toubabs live – they call it the maison blanche, or white house. HA!)
9:18, arrive inside the maison corps de la paix compound, tell the guard that cars are stupid, grab the pint-cup of tea I had made a day ago and reserved in the fridge for my future self, and plopped in this chair to sit in front of this computer and tell you all this story, since I feel like my blog entries were beginning to exclude the more colorful events that happen in my life, living here.
So there goes. Hopefully that won’t happen again, and I’d like to say I’ve definitely learned my lesson, but knowing that I have 11 more months here leads me to believe that my stupidity will prevail again sometime and I’ll have another mental car adventure to share.
Currently 10:27. In the line-up: a scrubbing shower, sheet retrieval, dragging of a foam mattress to the roof, and asleep by 11. ‘Till next time.
Being Ñamoo 
