Coming home

Trying to get the taxi started, but at least we're in Senegal again.

I want to say this about our voyage: I've never decided to set out like that, to discover a country on my own, to go without a plan. All of my previous trips have been with a purpose, never to just go on a whim, with no itinerary in mind. We were equipped with a few changes of clothes and an outdated West Africa Lonely Planet. En plus, we were two girls from Senegal making the trek alone, making it after a sejour of seven months in Senegal lending to our ability to dig deeper than just the topsoil of the place and really try to see it out -- within the rights of our limitations in how far you can really know in 10 days. We could shed certain cliches like traveling in a taxi brousse or the feeling of "being in Africa" or of buying a cheesy African souvenirs to take home. Further, we found ourselves embraced constantly by a Senegalese world, one in which we never would have discovered had we set foot in Mauritania cold without a Senegal under our belt. We found Wolof and names we knew to pronounce and family friends who aided and directed and talked to us along the way -- it was a a home away from home transporting us from familiar to new and back again.

And Tsilat was a love. The way we learned to mold ourselves to each other. You don't have tissue but I do. Where's my chapstick, here use mine. Sitting half on each other laps four deep in a backseat made for three of a small Mercedes and scheming when to best collectively shift so the dozing butt cheek could tingle to life again. The long talks in the desert staring out at the full moon lit dunes or entertaining ourselves with stories of our childhood, our adulthood, and where we go from here sitting in a car full of strangers who don't speak English and the strange feeling you get when just release something so private and hope that your assumption that no one speaks English is true.


And we came home. Back to Dakar. What a feeling to know the road, the buildings, the layout, the food, to remember what we love, what we hate, and to finally finally fall into the uncomfortable lumpy beds at our host family's house and know that it's ours, it's the familiar, and that we made it. Somehow, my god, Senegal we're back.