Our Nutshelled Life

We live in an area of Dakar called Ouakam. It’s nicely situated between downtown, where you’ll find my office and Tamara’s school, and the beaches of Les Almadies and N’Gor to the north. We’re tucked away from the main road by about 25 meters of gravel path ending at a wrought iron gate. Beside our little three-room home there is a bachelor’s flat where a Senegalese lady lives, and across from that there is a larger single story house used by vacationers usually coming from other African countries. Walking behind our house you pass a second story home where a family lives on the way to the main courtyard. In the courtyard there is a swing set and a pool, which these days is more of a larva puddle for mosquitoes than anything else, and past that you’ll find the crowning achievement of the whole property, a giant baobab tree. Across from the baobab is the school for handicapped children.
When we first arrived there weren’t any kids yet because it was still summer holidays. But with each passing week, little by little, the little people marched into school and now it is full. There are probably 15 kids all together now. In the beginning it took a little bit for them to warm up to our presence. We started with a salaam aleikum here and a na nga def there. One afternoon, a couple of weeks after school started, a few of the more adventurous children approached Tamara while she was using the computer in the shaded Wi-Fi zone (which we somehow lucked-out getting for free with a faint signal) in our yard. They asked her name and how she was doing and Tamara did the same, in Wolof and French. The kids smiled and laughed, some more shyly than others, and seemed pretty content to have a new playmate. They surrounded Tamara and proceeded to poke and prod at the computer screen. To avoid the laptop becoming the newest plaything for the kids Tamara gave a quick yet courteous au revoir and since then we have had a whack of miniature Senegalese friends in our backyard.
Proceeding to the back of the courtyard you will find what I would call the students’ quarters. There are about ten little rooms, five on each side, all with a screened door facing out to a walkway that encircles the building. At the far end there is a dining room and a kitchen. In the centre of the building all of the rooms give access to a hallway, which leads onto the shared bathrooms. Our friend Emile, a student of literature from Burkina Faso, is staying in one of the rooms. In three of these other pads live our French Canadian friends Anne-Marie, Marie-Helene and Mathieu, or as Tamara would call them, “the Kwee-bek-kwa and Anne-Marie”. The five of us have shared in a few trips, a few adventures and a lot of “Settling of Catan” since we arrived.
Walking up that path to the Cheikh Anta Diop highway we pass a Catholic school, a square of living quarters for nuns and the church Notre Dame des Anges. We rent out our home from the church and the sisters take care of the any maintenance issues. Sister Rita, or lovely Rita as I like to think of her, is the Madame who takes care of the property and collects our rent. One of the first times we saw her she was speeding into the courtyard at the driver’s seat of her SUV, tinted windows rolled down and shades on. She hopped out of the Ford onto her short legs and flipped open her cell phone; some business needed attending to. A formidable flip-flop wearing force of a woman, she is always issuing instructions and charging someone with some task. Whether it’s tending to the garden, fixing our lock or supplying us with purple, ant-eating gel, she’s perpetually a woman on the move. We think Whoopi Goldberg must have researched the life of Sister Rita for Sister Act.
So that is our little world, tucked away from the sputtering engines and black fumes of Dakar’s busy streets.