The lesser things

I spend my afternoons at the gas station at the end of the street, a mini-mart where you can buy corn flakes and imported beer. The store has plastic tables where customers sip café au laits and eat pizza ordered from the counter. There is wifi and a generator, which means a way to charge computers whose batteries have run dry in our days without power. Needless to say, the place draws quite a crowd.

Outside, too, there is a multitude. Young children who carry begging bowls made from tomato tins. They ask you for cent francs—100 CFA, which doesn’t buy much in Dakar. A few spoonfuls of yogurt. Four pieces of candy. With 300 CFA you can buy a mayonnaise and French fry sandwich. With 500 CFA, the man at the sandwich stand will add a fried egg. He leaves his empty ketchup containers in a tree beside the stand at night. The begging children fish down the plastic jars and pass them around. They scrape their hands against the inside walls and lick the residue from their fingers.

When I leave the mini-mart, I hand out my change until I am depleted of 100 CFA coins. It’s never enough. Each week there are new faces demanding cent francs. Lifetime staff in the international aid community talk of “compassion fatigue,” the way working in ceaseless poverty wears on them over many years. I’m not there, but my own reservoirs have run dry by the end of each day. I’m sorry for the children I see outside the gas station; I watch them watching the man next to meet eat a slice of pizza. My heart breaks for the woman who sings to her baby beside the road, displaced people who have no place to go. I’m sad for the teenager who sells cell phone cards outside the ice cream store. I can’t imagine he makes enough coins in a day to buy a cone. I pity, too, the lesser things, the new litter of kittens who lived in the trash pile on the corner. I watched them die, one by one, until there were none left. My roommate and I fed a kitten from an earlier litter for a while. We debated bringing her home, but we know we are both leaving within the year. Then what would we do with her? Now when we look for her, she’s no longer in the usual spot. I like to think some kind soul took her home, but it’s hard to fathom in this place.