Home Sweet Home

After 40 days, and, however many thousands of kilometers I finally made it back to Dakar. I had even missed the place, but all feelings of nostalgia quickly dissipated, blown away by yet another interminable traffic jam before we even arrived in Dakar proper. Sometimes I swear that Dakar must be Wolof for “traffic jam, detour and road work” and people just don’t want to tell me the truth. Also the money just started pouring out of my pocket again.

It’s Kinda Efficient

The traffic out here is pretty bad. Dakar is the kind of city where you find yourself in a traffic jam on a Wednesday night at 3 AM and you wonder just where the fuck it is that people are going. Last Tuesday morning I was heading toward the Mobil station. Even though it was after the morning rush hour (yall know I wouldn’t get up that early) there was still a lot of gridlock. If you have negotiated a good price with the cabdriver and he really can’t afford to sit there in traffic your driver will instantly transform into a Dakar Rally driver and veer off-road to try to skip ahead of the traffic jam. I have seen them do this many times (including once when we drove through a construction zone) but this is the first time the driver got caught. A crossing-guard with large white gloves whistled us down. And in less time than it took to me write Caitlin a text message to tell her that I would be late cause my cab was getting a ticket, we were off.

It’s common sense that corruption and inefficiency are synonymous. Except that instead of sitting there for several minutes as the officer wrote a ticket, the driver and officer were able to strike a bargain that worked for both of them that seems quite efficient to me. The driver got to pay less than he would have paid for the ticket, the officer was able to get augment his pitifully low salary with some tax-free income, the driver was penalized for his infraction and traffic kept moving.