A room with a view: random notes about life in Senegal, especially useful if you want to start a mixed-race family on the verge of mid-life
Savings
In Senegal 80% of the population does not have a bank account, many of those live day by day and struggle to be able to feed their family, which is often pretty large. Money is almost impossible to save because of widespread poverty, and when people manage to set...
Three magic words
If you are coming to Senegal or you have a Senegalese and/or muslim friend, you need to know three magic words that are used countless times per day here. These are Arab words linked to Islam but I have heard them from Christians too, as a sign of how widespread they...
Leftovers, anyone?
In my house leftovers entered the stage with me. The kids pretend they like them and my husband makes tremendous efforts to eat them because, sometimes, I don’t offer an alternative. Leftover food is still kind of a tabou in this country. It’s mostly for the poor,...
Wanna grab a quick bite?
Walking around Dakar you will see makeshift tents at every street corner, tied to poles, so that they kind of make a “room”. It is the gargottes, little low-profile restaurants with only a table and a few benches, where you can have breakfast (sandwiches with eggs,...
Taxis
According to a 2020 research (data from the World Bank and the National Institute of Statistics and Demographics *) there are 25,000 taxis roaming the streets of Dakar every day, for roughly 400,000 travelers (in an almost 4,000,000 people city). Taxis are easy to...
Tabaski (Aid el Kebir) Part 2
Tabaski and I go back to 5 october 2014. A friend of mine invited me to his sister’s house and I happily said yes, not knowing what to expect. I was imagining a Christmas-like kind of day: you eat a lot, you drink, you chat and then, when you can’t eat anymore you...
Tabaski (Aid el Kebir) Part 1
Next week-end is Tabaski. Tabaski is the Senegalese name of Aid el Kebir, the mutton feast. In honor of the supreme sacrifice that Abraham was ready to offer, killing his son because God asked him to, Muslims today sacrifice a mutton. Just like all traditional...
How I became a stepmother overnight
It was the end of the summer, my brand new husband’s youngest children (11 and 13 years old) had spent the whole summer with us. In the summer everything goes, you wake up late and eat ice cream at all times, and I was absolutely not interested in issuing directives...
Buutik
When my sister came back home after living one year in Canada, in the glorious 90’s, she would tell me about something I considered fabulous: the dépanneur. This legendary dépanneur was a small shop that sold anything in small doses, at the weirdest times (for us in...
No Friday is Casual Friday
In Sengal every Friday is fashion week. Senegalese men and women are exquisitely elegant and love to wear traditional clothes in rich, buttery soft embroidered fabrics, lace and ruffles everywhere for women, 15 sq. meters caftans and headscarves nonchalantly and yet...