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.

June 21st

Today I walked again. Only about 18km, but it felt good to walk, though urban Dakar is not as meditative as the Camino. Many people had told me that when the Camino ends, peregrinos still feel the need to walk everyday. Like an hitch. I didn't have that feeling. I think because when we finished, I was so tired, to have overcome my two tendinitis, and to have Angelina fly back to Brazil, and to travel to a new continent. But now that I am a bit adjusted, yes, I kind of feel the need to move and be on the go. Though the beauty of the Camino was to be within a frame made for peregrinos, and surrounded by people who either are peregrinos or who know all about it. It almost felt like when I was living on campus at American University. Surrounded by people in the same frame everyday. Easy to befriend people, easy to relate to one another. Just a relaxed atmosphere of people with the same overall objective.

Once out of Spain, it is a totally different story. In a way I am glad that I am hanging out with Astou for a while as I think it would have been hard for me to "graduate" from the Camino and then be on my own to digest all this in a totally foreign context.

So today is also the first day of summer. Ha! Yes, it makes me realize that just like when I spent a summer in Kuwait, deciding to travel through Africa during the summer was perhaps not the bests of ideas. Lol oh well...I am here now...so I will make the very best of it.

I am amazed at how being in an healthy balanced relationship with Angelina is making me have a different approach on things. This afternoon, Astou was asked to be part of the jury for Elite Model Agency Africa region casting. Had I been single I would most definitely have jumped on the opportunity and begged Astou to take me with her. Today though, she offered me to go with her, but I declined. Instead I went walking 18km in the burning sun outside. No regrets at all.

Did you know that Dakar has the only shopping mall of francophone west Africa? Quite funny actually, as it does not look like those giant malls in the US. This one is rather like Bay Side mall in Miami, relatively small. And the funny thing is that apparently, many people come from all over not just to shop, but also to see an escalator for the very first time. They go up and down on it as if they were in an amusement park.

I still haven't found where I will be volunteering. I cant wait as I feel the need and want to get out of Dakar and move on to the next stop. Dakar is very expensive and not necessarily what I am looking for on !y trip. Good thing though is that it is allowing me to see another side of Africa that I wouldn't have suspected. It is more than apparent now that Africa does have a lot of money, but it is only concentrated in the hands and pockets of a few families. Is that unfair? Am not sure. I think that the unfair part is rather that the rich have enough money to grease the hands of the government and the administration to allow them to move ahead while the poor are stuck with what they have and have to simply accept what the administration is giving them and the pace at which it is administering. In such countries, money is a necessary evil if one wants to grow and evolve.

Camino photos!!!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52537245@N00/sets/72157645275032462/