Ooops I Crapped My Pants

So I forgot that I never told you about my “Oops I crapped my pants!” moment.

En route to CV, we stopped in Dakar, Senegal for the day. We arrived at 4am and had been told (before we left Atlanta) that a PC rep would meet us at the airport, and then drive us to hotel, where we would stay until 8pm before flying on to Cape Verde. We stepped off the plane, down a rickety stair to the tarmac and actually had to walk across the runways to the “terminal” which was actually a dingy old warehouse with one “guard”, a guy about 18 with a huge gun in his belt. There was a lady there holding a PC sign (the only other person in the entire “Airport”), but she spoke no English. She just smiled and nodded a lot. So we gathered our bags and stood around for a while until I (having been assigned the task of “Group Leader”) tried to sign some language to her to figure out what we were supposed to do next. Eventually I discerned that she was telling me there were 2 guys from PC with trucks outside. “Outside?” I said and signed. She nodded. “With a truck?” I said and signed? More nodding. So, I tell the group of 30 other volunteers to wait for me in the airport, while I go get things sorted out. I walk confidently through the warehouse/terminal smiling all the while, past the guy with the gun, find the door to the streets outside, and with bags hanging from my shoulder (like a total idiot), step out into the pitch black morning, and the streets of Dakar.


OOPS I CRAPPED MY PANTS.

Very little light from the 1 or 2 street lamps in the streets, buildings are half finished or half demolished, I can’t tell which, all crumbly looking and falling apart, trash EVERYWHERE in the streets, EVERONE staring at me like I was a duck on fire or something, and I was IMMEDIATELY swarmed by dozens of tall, skinny Senegalese men that (this sounds terrible but its true) you could barely make out in the darkness. Guys were pulling on my bags and tugging on my clothes, someone stuck a hand in my pocket looking for a wallet and all the while they are hollering things that literally sounded like “Umba Wubba Lubba Gongo Wamba!” Total and Immediate culture shock, and genuine fear for my life. Not another English speaking person or anyone even resembling an official in sight (not even to stamp passports or anything). I’d love to say I did something calm or rational, and truth be told, I can’t remember exactly what I did, except to say that I choked down some fear-vomit, grabbed my bag like a football and hi-tailed it back into the airport with my balls shrunken to the size of raisins. All of this took about 15 seconds. I, now doused in a cold sweat, pale from fear, shuddering and heaving and panting, found myself standing in front of the huddled group of other volunteers in the airport. They all turned and stood staring nervously at me with wide-eyes, trying in their minds to account for the abrupt change in my appearance and demeanor, at which point I exclaimed very loudly “Don’t Panic!! Everything’s going to be OK!!!”

Long story short, after first calming myself and then some of the more excitable girls in our group, I made a phone call (this took about an hour as the operator spoke no English and I speak no Senegalese) to PC headquarters and learned that there were 2 guys in a truck out there somewhere and that I should “just go find them.” Thank you Peace Corps. Ended up (using sign language again) having the guy with the gun in his pants escort me a few hundred yards till I found them asleep in a van. After much confusion with the bags and sign-languaged bartering over the cost of the ride to the hotel, we eventually we all made it to the hotel with all our bags (another fun story). The hotel was really nice (for Dakar) and eventually we made it safely on to Praia in CV the next day. As reward for having successfully led our entire group and all our accoutrements safely to CV (a task assigned to me my PC only due to my relatively advanced age), I have yet to have to pay for a drink in-country.

CV is NOTHING like Dakar. It’s poor here to be sure, but everyone here is nice, polite, pleasant, helpful, interested, beautiful, etc. The country certainly has its problems (which I’ll talk more about later) but it’s a different fucking planet over there in Sengal. NOTE TO ANYONE COMING TO VISIT….fly through Lisbon or Paris instead.