Road notes: Day 5 West Africa/ Day 131 Africa crossing
Dakar/ 0 miles
Sunday, woke up feeling way off emotionally. The news from yesterday finally sunk in. Even my morning Mojo, my coffee, failed to give me the usual positive jolt.
Ille NGor is a tiny island about a half mile away from mainland Dakar. I took the ‘public boat’ to cross it, $2. I’m the only white guy on this boat crammed with 40 people.
No cars on the island, the place is a maze of houses connected by these pathways that weave among them. Lots of artists live there. You can walk most of the periphery and watch the sea crash on the craggy rocks. I asked directions at one point of a lady who looked like an artist, who I figured spoke English, and she did. She lived in New York but spoke glowingly of this little island that she hoped she’d move to one day. She accorded it mystical powers, talked of how there was ‘integration’ here… ‘everything…love, people, even… mathematics”. Mathematics? That was a new one. “If you see it from above, you can see it’s perfectly shaped and all rises to a single point”. Which was just ahead of us, a bluff maybe all of 50 feet above the island.
We parted ways there as a photographer and some other well-dressed people greeted her. She had mentioned some kind of interview. I wondered who she was. But I was grateful to her for that short spat of artistic vision shared — it lifted my mood a bit.
Much later, I met a wood carver, a big happy seeming man who joyously welcomed me to an outdoor restaurant. He was so exhuberantly friendly, in a sincere non-cloying manner, that after assuring him that there was no way I was going to buy any of his carvings as I had no room for them on my motorcycle, invited him to have lunch with me. We talked and laughed a lot about various things, skimmed over the topics men in their 50s/60s touch upon. He was a teetotaler, had never once touched alcohol nor cigarettes. I was impressed. An interesting, intelligent and apparently joy-filled man.
Later I told him this short story that had just come to me as I walked around the island. A very rich man is alone on this very same island, walking around, very lonely, his pursuit of wealth having eventually driven away his wives and estranged him from his kids. He goes into one of the artist enclaves and finds a lot of solace talking with a couple who are both artists. He buys several of their works, unframed paintings. He just wants to extend the companionship he’s feeling with them. Later, when he’s alone, sitting on an outcropping looking over the ocean, he lets each painting fall away into the sea.
Anyways… I told my new friend that and he got it right away, and then the smile left him and I got a dose of reality. “Why didn’t that man give the money to the poor? Why doesn’t he help THEM!?” And then, the veneer, the happy face put on for the touriste, dropped away… “I work every day of the week, come to this island, trying to sell these wooden pieces. I have 6 children, the oldest is 15. I have nothing, just what I sell today. My kids are waiting for me to come home, hoping I will bring them something.” In other words, I don’t get that story at all. It makes no sense to someone in his position. The man is not to be pitied, but despised. And only one who has never experienced poverty could see it another way.
We ate in silence for a while. I felt properly chastened. Enlightened really, yet again. Others have called me on my ignorance of just how hard the daily moment to moment existence of the poor can be. The message never sticks. Or I just prefer to forget it.
I decided to buy a couple of his bracelets, 2 for $14, the exhorbitant asking price. It was an excuse to give him a sale. I didn’t actually want the bracelets, they would just be an encumbrance. So I told him to give them to these two girls who’d passed me by earlier, who’d bestowed upon me a couple of beautific toothy smiles just being sweet to this man, thrice their age. “But don’t give it to them until I’m pulling away on the boat” I said, as I sure didn’t want to meet them. I left him then, stood waiting for a boat to get back to the mainland.
Suddenly he was beside me. “They want your telephone number. “ And he pointed back at the two young women, who were perhaps as hard up as he was.
“You weren’t supposed to give it to them until I was on my way!”
He just gleamed at me. Two young women my friend. I pointed to the ring on my finger and shook my head, tried to make a joke of it, and started walking to the boat coming on shore. He seemed surprised. But then followed me, negotiated a $1 local fee for me, and gave me one of his joyous smiles. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Mark”. I seemed to have passed some test.
