Reflection on the Early Days

It’s Memorial Day back in the U.S., and that’s ok.  It’s Monday here, and that is my present. I have always been down for the holidays, all of them! Any excuse to make and devour a good meal and have family and your really good friends over is cool.

I have been so delayed in writing about my experiences in Senegal, and today, on this Monday, I make peace with it. It was completely ambitious and heartfelt to want to do so, but it’s hard to report minute by minute and keep it authentic.  Real life moves fast, and largely this discovery that is being had I am still processing. Not to mention, some moments have been too tender to share.

It makes me think about memoirs. Maybe it’s not that you have to be old to write a memoir, but you have to have lived through enough and experienced, processed, and reflected to be able to sit down and write about it.

I have been living in Senegal for almost four months now. It’s been an adventure. Now that the dust has mostly settled I have space to think about the early days.

When we left the first place we intended to stay; things got a little crazy. We hotel hopped three times before we could find a place to breathe for a couple of days. Hotel reviews in Dakar are absolutely worthless.  I found that most of these reviews were based either African or European standard and that is nothing like a good ole American Yelp review.

For a couple of weeks there I honestly felt homeless, Senegal was dragging us.  We even left one hotel in the middle of the night when we discovered it would not do.  You guessed it! A battalion of roaches had utterly commandeered the hotel. And, not just any old roaches.  These were African roaches; there is a difference.

Now, I went ahead and blew up about it. As a long-term veteran in my former life of working in property management, I knew I had to it.   It was like the director had cued action because there was no way in the world we were not getting our money back from that little nightmare of an operation. Nonetheless, it was mild considering what could have happened.  

But, let me backtrack a little to before we discovered we were under attack by the Senegalese Underground Army of Roaches (SUAR).  I was weak and lethargic still from jet lag and our activities that day. But, also I knew it was going to be some mess at that hotel as we were taking the tour.

Mustafa, bless his little heart.  He wanted to show us all of our options for the hotel.  So he showed us a couple of the rooms, and they all had very different themes and arrangements.  But, I kid you not, after about 12 rooms I got suspicious. I actually asked the hubby, “is anyone else staying here?”   And, almost instantly I realized it was eerily quiet there. No one was in the cafe. Not one time did anyone need to come up or down the stairs while we were on the Gilligan’s Island tour.  It was rather peculiar for the location of the hotel. People should have been bustling about the place. However, when you are under the influence of jet lag and have a child in tow, decisiveness is imperative.  So we chose a room and got busy moving out of one hotel, and into another hotel.

I felt like I was experiencing what it would be like to not have a permanent spot.  And, I contemplated if we ever would find a decent place to live.

It was just about midnight that we got our money back and moved out of the SUAR military base.  Mustafa and the crew over there were royally ashamed, as they should have been. That said, I was most appreciative that they loaded our bags into their hotel shuttle and took us to the next hotel we chose.

And, hallelujah!  It was a fantastic hotel!  The beds were so comfortable in comparison to other places we stayed, bug-free, and there were plenty of people coming and going even late at night.  We booked it for the next two nights and collapsed into the mattress every mother in the world should be able to fold into after a day with a toddler, work, and a husband.

It was in the wee hours of Saturday morning, and you couldn’t hear sound from that hotel room for hours to come.  It took us days to finally experience it, but we had peace.