A Day in the Life

We woke up with the dawn.

Sleeping in the main room, it was a toss up weather or not daylight or another team member puttering around would wake me up. This didn’t usually bother me, for the last three months I’d been sharing rooms with strangers who came in and out at all hours of the night.

Over the next hour or so the rest of the team would congregate onto the front patio that was our command center/ hangout area/ conference center/ dining room. Meals were divided up among the team. One person cooks, another cleans, rotate.

Breakfast is a planning session. I mostly keep my mouth shut while Jordan, Adam, Markus and Pat talk about what they want to get accomplished that day. Chris and Erin chime in every once in a while, offering helpful suggestions and coordinating photography and film.

The tasks mostly revolved around communication. The team was investing in making contacts in the local port authority, the international school, and making friends with the Peace Corps reps. On top of all this, the team had to communicate with friends, family, and OAR NW contacts back home.

All this communication required two things: power and internet.

There was no power grid on the island to hook into, so we ran our devices with what little juice we could squeeze out of the solar panels on the roof of the house. These panels are linked into a series of four car batteries, which are possibly older than I am. It’s a pretty impressive system given it’s location, and would easily provide enough power for a three-person family with low technology needs. Unfortunately for us, we had two Panasonic Toughbooks, 8 mobile devices ranging from tablets to smartphones, and a whole passel of camera batteries, all of which aggressively consumed electricity.

Compounding this was a lack of any kind of Internet on the island. We’d purchased two “Expresso” mobile hotspots, which basically turned anything with a USB port into a 3g mobile Internet platform. These were great, but for whatever reason none of our devices could talk to them, so while they gave the Toughbooks wireless internet, everyone else was out of luck. Adam found a free Wi-Fi network at the very edge of our property, but it faded in and out, and could basically only be used to download emails. Adam and I would stand at the edge of our property, download emails, return back to the patio to write responses, and then head back out to send them all in one big dump.

Activities vary from day to day.  Sometimes Chris and Erin go to the mainland to recharge their computers, edit photos and video, and answer emails. Jordan, Adam, Pat, and Markus write emails, call people, or occasionally head to the mainland for face to faces. Most people find time to work out. My favorite is to swim from the island to the mainland and back, a trip that amounts to about a kilometer and a half of swimming.

Lunch depends on what’s happening. If the team is together at the house, someone usually cooks. If not, lunch is your own responsibility. My favorite lunch in Senegal was from a beachside shack run by an enormous Senegalese woman who insisted we call her “Momma Africa”. Her shack only served a few entrees, the best of which was Yassa Poisson.

Yassa Poisson was a plate of rice, stir fried vegetables, lettuce, French fries and a massive whole Dorado fish that took up nearly half the plate. I have rarely had better meals, but I’ve never had more or better food for what amounts to about two U.S. dollars. They’d even deliver it from the beach to our house, which was only about fifty meters, but still.

Some days we’d do filming. One afternoon Erin, Chris and the team did a shoot of them running stairs at Dakar’s largest and most visible monument: the Monument to the African Renaissance. The night of my arrival, Jordan had pointed it out to me, barely visible from our beachside bungalow and explained it’s history.

The Monument to the African Renaissance was donated to the country of Senegal by the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. It is nearly as large as the Statue of Liberty, and can be seen from anywhere in Dakar. I won’t bother describing it, because it can really only be fully appreciated visually.

Yep. But hey, the Senegalese love the damn thing, people come from all over Africa to see it, and it’s got the largest set of stairs this side of Mali. What’s not to like?

You know, aside from it being built with blood money by the most evil regime since the Khmer Rouge.

Sometimes we’d spend the afternoons testing out equipment. Markus and I spent a decidedly scientific half hour determining if a kite he’d brought along with him would be able to handle attaching a camera for shooting aerial video. We tested this by duct taping a beet to the kite and flying it around for an hour or so.

You know. For science.

Because of our power constraints, the light governed our lives. Pretty much all productive activity shut down before 8 pm, when the last ferry to our island home went. We could buy passage later than that, but it would be double the cost, and more than that, Ngor Plage isn’t all that interesting past 8pm.

Dinner was by candle light. The house came with hurricane lamps, basically a small lantern with glass on three sides that kept the wind from blowing out the candle. We’d set up three of them outside for dinner and conversation and two more in the kitchen to cook by.

I never realized how much I like candle light. It cast’s a warm glow that still provides plenty of light to see by, and it feels so much more comfortable than electricity. We would buy a case of Gazelle, the cheap Senegalese beer that is bottled by the liter and isn’t much better than water, and sit around the table and converse until the candles died.

In it’s own way, my time in Senegal was the most relaxed I ever felt on the trip. Despite being in a country where I could barely communicate, was constantly a minority in every sense of the word, and always had the pressing concerns of clean food, clean water, and reliable communication, I had a great time.

-Doug