Photo: Dakar Dem Dikk buses at the Liberty 5 Terminus
I
wouldn't necessarily describe myself as an adventurous person. Even when I
approach projects or trips that seem daring, I function best when I have clear
guidelines and goals in place. When I traveled on my own in Europe, I had maps,
a global subway app and had spent many hours going over the simplest details so
that I wouldn’t have too many surprises along the way. Imagine getting to Dakar and discovering that
people don’t know street names here. When taking a cab, you tell the driver the
landmark in the neighborhood where you want to go. Sometimes the driver tells
you to get in and asks for directions from people on the street along the way.
To this day, I can’t tell you what street I live on or what my house number is,
but I can give you such good directions that you will find it with no problem.
Within a week I had to find a map of Dakar since I needed to see the general
layout of the city. Even with the map, I had to live with the fact that I
couldn’t use the map to ask people for directions. It’s not that these streets
don’t have names because they do. It’s just that street names don’t seem as
important as in other places.
Figuring
out how to navigate Dakar wasn’t the most complicated thing I would have to do
in the three weeks that I have been here; it’s using the public transportation.
As with street names, no one could give me straight answers or direct me to the
right website to figure out how to use the buses, car rapides and other forms
of transportation. The Dakar Dem Dikk are buses run by the city and I was
finally able to find a schedule for them online. The car rapides as I was told
don’t have a specific route that they follow and instead you have to listen to
the assistant in the back calling out the final destination. What I needed to
figure out was the TATA buses that would get me to my internship from school or
home. If I really wanted to be lazy, I could easily take a cab but there’s no
way I could act like a tourist for the next four months. After a couple times
of taking the wrong TATA and ending up in the wrong destination, I finally
conquered the public transportation by taking the right TATA, making a transfer
and getting to the internship on time. I was able to go back without getting
lost or falling over on the very crowded buses. It does help that I was with
another student and we were working together to make this happen. I like to
joke that with each day that comes I am becoming more Senegalese.
One
thing that I appreciate about this lack of street names and direct information
on the public transportation system is how much people are willing to help you
when you ask questions. At one point, I was leaving the downtown area and
heading back home but had no idea how to get back. One of the guys on the TATA
first told me how much to pay, made sure I got off the right stop and then made
sure I understood which transfer to take. When I did run into some trouble, I
asked a lady who also gave me very good directions. Everyone I have encountered
has been so nice in helping this foreigner figure out how to best get around
Dakar.
One
thing that I don’t know how I will easily adjust to is the traffic. There’s
always traffic at every time of the day and I am not kidding. On Fridays, I go
to my internship in the suburbs of Dakar. According to google maps, the trip
should take about 31 minutes. They obviously don’t take into account the
circulation because it took us 2 hours to get there. It looks like I am going
to have to hope that I don’t have to stand up the entire time for the 4 hour
round-trips that will be happening every Friday. I am still baffled by how
people make it to appointments on time or how my professor arrives to my 8:30
am class before us when he lives in one of the suburbs that I always pass by.
I
am sure that there will be more problems related to navigating Dakar and using
the public transportation system but I am happy to report that I am beginning
to make sense of a system that seemed chaotic at first.
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