In Photos - Dakar's environs

We visited Keur Moussa, a Catholic monastery, for a traditional mass mixed with African music. Then we stopped at Lake Rose, where the high salt content turns the water pink in the afternoon sun. Finally, the turtle village on the way back to town.

Forecast

Dakar is hot. Ungodly hot. The kind of heat that assaults from all angles. It radiates downward from the cloudless sky and upward from the sand at my feet. It presses in from every side, bounces off the concrete buildings, flows over the ocean in a hot wave of humid air.

At midday, no one moves. If I am home, I stay in my room. I stretch out on the bed and I will the heat to pass. If the power is on, I crank up the fan and aim it at the bed. If the power is out, I lay in a pool of sweat. Moisture beads on my arms, in my hair, and I am drenched.

The weather is also variable.

I pull myself up off the damp bed and take a cool shower. I cross the street for lunch, head from the lush confines of the villa where I live to the cool inner courtyard of the home where I eat. The space between the two is negligible, a 10-minute walk at most. But in the bright sun and fierce heat of midday, it is an impossibly long stretch. I arrive red-faced and sweating.

We eat together on the floor. On Sundays, it’s always the same: yassa, chicken stewed in an onion broth and served over rice. The madame scoops bits of rice and sauce and meat with her hand. She pulls apart the chicken and flings bits to each person seated around the metal dish. There are nine of us today. We spoon the chicken into our mouths like hungry birds.

The power is off for most of the meal, and without the fan the heat inside the living room is heavy and thick. But as we eat the last grains of rice, a breeze stirs the leaves of the mango tree in the courtyard. I look out the open back door, and I see that the blue sky is covered over with grey. The temperature drops, and in the stillness of an afternoon without electricity, we can feel the coming storm.

I say my goodbyes, and I pass through the courtyard into the narrow alleyway. The wind kicks up the sand that is everywhere here, and I squint and turn my head from the gritty blast. The people around me turn their heads, too. We are all hurrying, trying to reach some secure spot before the storm hits. The wind blows in gusts, and laundry set out to dry in the heat of the day snaps on the line. A sheep tied to a tree brays and yanks on his tether. Blades of grass ripple at his feet.

I move back across the street, my head bent against the storm. I unlock the gate to my villa and duck inside as the first drops of rain fall. The heat that has been building all day suddenly slackens, and the grey clouds overhead deliver us from the inferno.

Dark nights in Dakar

I started this morning crouched over a bucket of water. The water has been cut in Dakar—an unusual occurrence, residents assure me—and the woman who owns the villa where I live had the foresight to fill buckets early this morning.

It is a surprisingly natural thing, this bathing out of a bucket, and I laughed to myself when I realized my body had naturally assumed the posture I’ve seen on women washing beside the road.

If losing running water is rare, blackouts are more common, those daily cuts to the power system that leave us without fans, in the stifling heat, sometimes in the dark. When the cuts come at night, everyone is exasperated. People condemn the power company, the corrupt government, the oil oligarchy. They throw up their hands in frustration, and then they bring out the flashlights.

If the meal has already started, or if my host family is just sitting down to eat, then we stay where we are, gathered around a communal plate on the living room floor. The TV, for once, is silent. The fan overhead is still, and the heat in the room suddenly thickens, condenses. If we have not sat down to eat, we will go upstairs to the rooftop, where the air moves and the song from the muezzin in the mosque across the street can be heard clearly.

When I first arrived, during Ramadan, we once ate on the rooftop as soon as the sun set. The air still carried a trace of pink. We dipped our spoons into the platter of rice and fish, and I listened as the Senegalese talked politics and religion. The night darkened around us and a plane passed overhead, so close I thought I might run a hand along its belly if I just raised an arm. A current of hot air circulated in the plane’s wake and a low moan whirled through the archways of neighboring buildings like a passing djinn.

On other powerless nights we sat gathered in the living room long after the meal had been eaten, longer even than the rechargeable batteries for the flashlights could last. The bulbs slowly dimmed until we were sitting in blackness, and still we stayed. The madam’s brother—a professor at the university—and her sister visiting from France lead the debate about women’s role in the Koran. The father of the house hotly disputed their opinions. There was much laughter and ribbing.

The dark, close quarters of a night without electricity lend themselves to profound conversations. The streets, even, feel more intimate, and people bring chairs to sit in the sandy back alleyways between their homes. There is a collective relaxing, a letting go into the quiet of the powerless night. At any rate, the electricity will come back—perhaps in a few hours, perhaps in the morning—and there is no sense worrying in the mean time.

I hope the same can be said for the water.