En arrière

Yesterday, I chatted with my brother-in-law, Bob, about how my experience of the relative pace of life differed between my experience in Melaque and in Dakar. We were thinking about the relatively slow pace and peach we both had experienced in Melaque earlier this year.  I was hard-pressed to find words to compare my experiences.

Melaque Cafe

Perhaps one reason for the difficulty was that I was trying to  compare my experience in a city in Senegal to a town in Mexico. I might better have compared how I felt in Guadalajara with my impressions of Dakar.   

A few photos may evoke my experience in Dakar and Kaolack (cities), and the town of St. Louis in Senegal. 

Dakar Suburb

An additional factor in making the comparisons challenging, was that  I had very different reasons for my visits to Mexico and Senegal, so I had equally different impressions.


 I worked in Kaolack as a volunteer. It is a city that, due to its burning sand, and scorching dry heat, seemingly rises out of a desert.  The climate was daunting and I walked to work and back, not much more. However, within the confines of the home and the spacious enclosed courtyard of the family home, a quiet order, a simplicity, a generosity, and a lack of preoccupation with amassing material things reigned. The parents and their 2 daughters who were still living at home, welcomed me great generosity. 

Each morning breakfast, which consisted of of instant coffee, a piece of bread and an pleasantly greasy omelette 😃, was eaten sitting on small stools in the courtyard. We waved the ubiquitous flies away with small hand fans. Evenings, we squatted around a central dish of rice or fish, and then lounged on mats, chatting into the late evening hours.

Hospitality teranga while licence being updated on car. 

In Dakar during my two visits, I also stayed with Senegalese families. Unlike in Kaolack, the climate was delightfully humid and warm, and the streets were busy with people walking, shopping, and waiting to enter already loaded  local buses. Cars, donkey-pulled carts, and motocyclettes abounded. Despite this busy scene, life seemed to be at a slower pace than in Canada, although at a faster pace than in the small town of Melaque. In both places I felt more 'present' than I sometimes do in Canada. In Africa, I was rarely tempted to shop in order to entertain myself, or to acquire newer, more fashionable clothes--I speak as a visitor and not as a resident-- so I what I had was somehow 'enough'. In Melaque, I lived in a rented apartment.  I  therefore had to shop in Melaque for food, and some basic household equipment. It was fun also to look for souvenirs and suitable beach hats. 

The extra time in Senegal meant I probably read  more in Dakar. I am not sure, though, as in Senegal I spent most evenings with the host families. In Melaque, I spent evenings almost entirely on my own. I watched films in Spanish and wrote a blog and sometimes read. 

In both places I studied language. These two activities often allow me to forget time, and, therefore, they create in me a feeling of timelessness.   In that, there is little difference from my life since retirement in Canada, where spend many happy hours listening to, reading, and sometimes talking in French, Spanish and German. 

Dakar is on the ocean and I lived close to beach.  

Life seemed more simple in both places than in Canada for another reason. My visits provided me a welcome break from paying bills, and doing the paperwork demanded by life in Canada.  Also, I have long noted that, as a visitor, I am often able to declare a moratorium on working on a plan for my life! While on holiday, I generally focus on just two or three  objectives: enjoying nature, learning language, listening to new ways of thinking. These all contribute to a feeling of living a more sane, or less complicated life than I sometimes experience  in Canada. 

Finally, I must add, warmth, humidity and proximity to an ocean automatically exert a calming effect; the world slows down.