The next day brings hours of chaos and long lines, until we finally settle into seats on an airline I've never heard of. Belleview Air provides the milk run to Senegal (including a glimpse of UN helicopters in Freetown, Sierra Leone) and offers its passengers bony pieces of chicken with rice. More than once. A tip to the wise: anyone with a weak stomach should think twice before indulging.
The second shock has to do with language. I'm used to finding my way around Ethiopia with the fragmented Amharic I remember (plus English). Plenty of English-speakers populate Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Botswana. But in Dakar, a number of people answer my simple questions by saying (in perfect English), "I do not speak English." Ah. The major European language in former French colonies is French.
Ever used a French keyboard? The ones in the business center quickly put touch typists and hunt-and-peck typists on equal footing. Michael, a consultant who teaches in Geneva, suddenly finds himself in urgent demand as a translator.
Dakar is also shockingly expensive. The hotel-indeed, the whole city-abounds with French prices. We pay $20.00 for each modest buffet breakfast, $10 for bottles of Perrier water or beer. It's worth wading through aggressive vendors, longing to sell us everything from taxi rides to carved masks, to stock up on yogurt and cheese at the nearby grocery store.
The teachers that gather are eager to soak up every bit of information, every hand-out we have to offer. They've had hard journeys, many of them. I meet teachers who've been working in Abijan and now have no idea if they'll be able to return, teachers who drove for hours across several borders to get here, teachers who've tasted war and disruptions of all kinds, teachers who aren't sure when they'll be able to get a flight home.
"WAWA," people say with a shrug. West Africa Wins Again.
But Dakar is also beautiful.
The rush of warmth after my keynote address buoys me; my institute takes place in a room where we can look out over the ocean; and the hotel's background music? Surprise! Christmas carols. The night Leonard and I leave, strains of the Hallelujah Chorus serenade us as we wait for the airport shuttle. It's a strange fit with the warm air and the ever-present smell of fish, but we are, after all, heading back to gray skies and Kansas, where fluorescent green hedge apples hang like bulbs on the bare branches of Osage-orange trees and a television commercial announces that K-Mart will be open on Thanksgiving Day.
As I muse on three weeks in Africa, I think mostly about people-the amazing resiliency, courage, and hopes of frail and fickle humans, the joy in the sturdy rhythms and simple acts that keep us alive. I remember our small group of consultants and teachers slumping on shuttle bus seats at the Dakar airport, our suitcases, bags, and boxes finally collected. We fan our sweaty faces, slowly realizing that our time to leave the airport has collided with the drivers' time to break the day's fast. The men who had loaded our luggage gather on a mat just outside. No one explains. No one apologizes for the delay. Inside, we sit mostly in silence. Maybe we are too tired to talk, but nobody expresses irritation. Outside, the men drink tea, eat bread, and pray. The slightly sticky air settles around us all.
In spite of the magnificent animals, it's the people who haunt my memory after I get home:
The other consultants--a warm, curious, supportive, interesting and interested bunch of people, who quickly become buds as well as fellow travelers. I notice again that fascinating but difficult journeys often forge quick bonds.
Our Group of Eight (later Nine)-the intrepids who, with Rolex, fill our jeep on the Maasai Mara with sounds of delight, disgust, laughter, pity, fascination, and awe.
Writers who come up to me during the breaks and at social events to murmur about our shared love of the written word. A teacher from Sierra Leone explains that the old stories are disappearing fast-partly because young people no longer sit for hours with grandparents, partly because of community life disrupted by war. Her words make me sad but they also make me rejoice in her determination, in the commitment of the people I met on this trip who want to write the stories down now, before it's too late.
I'm always slightly surprised to find that things haven't changed much for Americans out in the wide world. When I talk about what it was like for me when I returned to the U.S., they nod in agreement. "Sure people will listen," they tell me, over and over. "They'll listen for about three minutes."
I remind them...I remind myself...about the power of writing. When we teach our students (and ourselves) to write well, we improve the odds that some reader, somewhere, will connect with what we Global Nomads have experienced. I quote from an interview I read on this journey. "I mean," writer Anthony Doerr says, "someone lays down a bunch of letters, and organizes them into sentences and paragraphs, and then someone else-years later, or a continent away-can let her eyes travel over those little hieroglyphs and, the next thing, she knows, she's seeing and smelling and hearing all sorts of [things]. And feeling too, feeling sick or laughing or crying, and that, to me, is absolutely fantastic and humbling and magic."
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