Dakar is greener now that it has rained, but it still remains a dusty brown place where it is impossible to get fresh air and greenery i.e. it lacks park space. Yet after a cursory search for green space I think I have found something far more interesting than the Senegalese Central Park. My host father always mentioned going to the jardin and last week I went with him to check it out. It turns out that for some reason (I can’t believe that in a city with as tight a housing market as Dakar the real estate developers haven’t gotten to it) there is a village in the middle of Dakar. Now I don’t know how big it is yet, or how aware people are of it, but it was disorienting to leave the city and suddenly enter a village after turning right off a random street where it bends left. If not for the ubiquitous trash—as usual mostly plastic bags, bottles and wrappers along with car tires and the random torn flip flop—and the tall apartment buildings at the horizon I could have confused the lettuce and cucumber fields, the thatched huts and open-air, wood-lit stoves for rural Senegal. I chilled with my host father and his crew of old drunks, one of who got angry at me for trying to learn Wolof instead of Sereer (of course if you ask Wolof people they say that everyone in Senegal is happy speaking Wolof). Another of his friends was “nice” enough to buy me a bottle of “sum sum.” I say “nice” because that stuff is lethal. In the southern more tropical regions of Senegal it is made from distilled cashew. In Dakar Village they make it with water, sugar and yeast which they then boil and distill. They showed me the tall barrels that had already been mixed and were ready to be boiled. It tastes like if you were too leave some bread dipped in water for a week and then drank the water with some gin. In fact they referred to it as “African gin” or “African tequila” depending on which old drunk you ask. My teacher told me that drinking that stuff will make you grow crazy, when they started pouring it out of an old bottle of motor oil I thought he might be right. There are also some pig pens (and the accompanying odor) and some of the old men also have large grills set up to smoke fish. In fact, earlier they had slaughtered a pig and when I showed up, in addition to drinking they insisted that I eat which was cool except that I had to eat with my hand. I am not at all opposed to eating with your hands except that the rice here is so greasy (I am talking Havana-level greasy) that the grease drips down your forearm when you ball it up to raise it to your mouth. Which brings me to an amazing fact:
