June 24th

Today was such a great and productive day!

Astou's boyfriend, Rene, picked me up at around 6:45am on the corniche.

Rene is partly a melon and tomato farmer and partly a petroleum engineer. So he has a very large land and does a lot of domestic business as well as partial exports. So today he took me to do his rounds of the fruit market and show me a bit what the business is all about.

It was so entertaining and interesting to walk around with him and meet all of the people that are part of his business chain. The sales ladies who are the front end in the markets are just so funny, colorful and with such strong personalities.

We grabbed a bite to eat food breakfast sitting on some dodgy piece of wood in the street, had a local sweet coffee at another stall.

Finally I felt like I was traveling again and soaking up in the culture. The culture of the masses.

We spent the whole day walking around the city and the. Markets. We even drove by the Dakar Chinatown. Uffff!!! Chinese are even here and even managed to learn perfectly the local dialects.

I was so please to see front end the indirect micro credit and social business enterprise that Rene has manages to create without realizing how important and exemplary it could be.

We even drove to the different offices where one must go to in order to export produce abroad. We also drove to the airport freight area to run some errands. In other words, the only piece of the chain I didn't get to see was his farm. Another time maybe.

But today really got me thinking a lot about the import export business as well as the farming business. There is just so much money to be made, with in parallel so much positive impact on the lively hoods of people to be done. Very inspiring overall.

This afternoon I also got to meet with Astou's hairdresser, this French guy called Yann. He is an expert on west Africa's jungle and countryside. And so I sat down with him a bit and he gave me bunch of advise on villages to go to and thing to be careful about.

I guess being in west Africa during the absolute worst part of the year: heat + monsoon, implies many risk factors when intending to go to the least reachable places in the region. And between the conflict in Mali and the serious Ebola outbreak in Guinea, I should be quite cautious. ;-)

Given how hot it was all day, I was so dying to just get home and take a cold shower, to not only cool down but also to scrub off all the dirt off of me. Lucky me, when I got home, there was no water at all. Not even a drop. The water supply in Dakar has been very hectic for a few years now, mostly due to corruption issues. Years back, the government in place had preferred to pocket a load of cash rather than use the committed money to maintain and repair the main water supply system of the whole city. This even caused the capital to be without water for a whole month during the summer of last year I believe. Scandalous. And sao to this day, the infrastructure has not quite yet been fixed.

Thankfully enough, the maids had saved some water in buckets the days before just in case.