The equatorial Sun has only just pierced the horizon, offering a dab of color to a sky that, for once, is quite foreboding. But no, not warning of rain — reeking of pollution. A cocktail of particulates has caused dangerous air quality across Senegal, and on this third straight day of it, the city feels suffocated.
All over Kaolack, the slate-gray haze is draped like a mothy blanket. On the best of days, it’s a place of varied descriptors. The nearest true city to my Peace Corps site. Infamously ringed by landfills and brackish river swales. Infamously cramped with nearly 350,000 in about two square miles — and like almost all of Senegal, built out and not up. A west-central transportation hub with multiple garages hustling taxis, sept-places, mini buses and large buses to all corners of the country.
I’ve arrived at one of these, Nioro du Rip, about 30 minutes ago. It’s quite a place to find oneself alone, a foreigner, at 7:15AM, on maybe four hours of sleep. So taking all of the above into account, the scene here plays out in front of my tired eyes like a film noir — frenetic-paced yet soft-hued.
But these observations arrive only in retrospect. Because at this moment, I’m trying desperately to remember how to breathe.
In….
Images come in shards, my senses fragmented. The clutched backpack pressing on my lap. The sept-place. Its hot, stale air. Its cramped walls. The claustrophobia threatening. Heart racing. My shallow inhale, rattling through the N95 membrane.
Out….
Am I having a panic attack?! I’ve never had one… but wait maybe I have and I just didn’t know but in this setting everything’s amplified and I’m alone and I’m traveling half a day if I’m lucky on minimal sleep in a body weak from food poisoning this week and the air quality is shit and I’m lightheaded and my only anchor is my phone but the lifeline is spotty at best and how the hell is any of this real lif — NO. No. Stop it. Breathe… Breathe. Breathe.
In….
Telling myself repeatedly to return to my senses, return to my senses, let them ground me in any way possible. I repeat like a mantra in my head: Sight. Sound. Smell. Taste. Touch. The grittiness of the cracked canvas-and-leather seat. The fatty, umami-rich aftertaste of the meat-and-onion breakfast baguette choked down in a squat along the curbside, littered sand and two parked Peugeots for company. The streams of humanity coursing at random around the vehicle, as river water to a weathered stone.
Out….
Mixed languages, tones, and desires filter from my left through the three inches of real estate between window and door frame. People selling, people haggling, the trading of Assalam Alaikum and other formalities. I arrived 2nd of 7 passengers, and forked over an extra milles francs for this coveted seat. The small crack will offer immense relief once we finally, please oh please move soon, inshallah.
In….
For now it’s decidedly less desirable. So many flavors of Senegalese society have come by and up to the sept-place that my wired brain simply can’t compute it — a surrealist scene painted in real time. Entering stage left and exiting right, they click by like slides in a Viewmaster.
Out….
A horde of barefoot talibés press dirt-caked faces and hands clutching cracked plastic pails to the glass. Begging is a required ritual of their Qur’anic schooling, and these boys have been sent away from home to live in a daara and study under a marabout. It’s a contentious subject: many Senegalese support the strict environments of humility, perseverance, and Islamic learning they provide, while perhaps overlooking the exploitative-to-cruel-and-unusual sides of them. Among those in the international community who are aware of the talibé plight, the practice is widely denounced.
To me it feels yet another of those global tide-changing clashes I first noticed four years ago in Dakar: of tradition and modernization, religious and secular, localized to globalized, root to shoot. Senegal and its people seem often caught in the middle, a dugout canoe bobbing precipitously to the times.
In….
And so it pains me to stare down the back of the driver’s headrest, but alas I have no wéccit to offer, having spent my last small bills and coins on the sandwiche yápp ak soblé.
With the deepest rattling breath I can muster, I turn and gesture remorsefully, palms to the sky: “Baal ma, am uma wéccit.” I’m sorry. I truly am. I don’t know for sure if they hear me. “Beneen yoon, inshallah.” But I mouth on. Next time, inshallah.
Out….
I turn now to my right, where a different scene plays out. The well-dressed, business-looking-man in the passenger’s seat has waved a hand, an intent to buy water from a passing woman. There happened, however, to be two sellers in his line of sight: each selling identical products — the ubiquitous palm-sized baggies of water torn open with the teeth and discarded as litter — and via identical methods, an insulated plastic cooler, wrapped in fabrics and balanced skillfully on their heads.
Oh boy, this is gonna be interesting…. I feel a flash of gratitude for the distraction, though. Anything to move time forward.
In….
Each woman veers on a collision course to his window, where a quick but heated argument begins. When the coolers are set down in order to gesticulate wildly, it feels like two hockey players dropping their gloves before a fight. As they trade verbal jabs, this draws the attention of yet more salespeople who, seeing a guy willing to spend some xaalis, a free spectacle, and a (literal) window of opportunity, close in. Now the entire right side of the car is flanked with prospectors: a man waving a board of cheap sunglasses, some teenagers with woven baskets of candied peanuts and raw pecans, a woman shaking shrink-wrapped sacks of oranges and limes at the businessman’s face.
Impressively calm amidst the scrum, he says something I can’t make out, sparking equal but opposite reactions. One woman smirks and bends down to retrieve a few baggies, while the other straightens and throws up her hands, letting out a disgusted HUH! and clicking her tongue. Bested this round, she clears out quickly, the transaction is made, and the man cuts his free hand back-and-forth through the air, felling the prospectors in a few clean swoops.
Out….
At long last, the final unlucky passenger squeezes her way into the back middle seat (godspeed, my friend) and after ashing one last cigarette from where he leans on the driver’s door, our chauffeur stretches, recounts for perhaps the fourth time the rainbow wad of bills in his hand, barks away the still-gathered talibé boys, gives a hearty spit, and settles into the car.
Darting back-and-forth in the rearview mirror, I’m immediately struck by his eyes: bloodshot, but in less a veiny way than as if they were dipped in dye — two small black islands in red seas. He’s a young-ish man, dressed simply in a worn football jersey, stocking cap, torn cutoff slacks, and clear plastic sandals, but I’m sure this livelihood can age a person. It’s a tough profession; drivers much like modern-day nomads, caravaning the sub-desert and often sleeping in their cars between long, hot, dusty trips. So while his appearance is a bit disconcerting, I have no choice but to put my faith, inshallah, in this man, and I’m beyond relieved to get moving.
In….
With the throatiest sputter the engine comes to life, and through my haze, I have to smile at the incredible hardiness of these vehicles, the vast majority Peugeots and Renaults some decades out of production. These French automakers should take advantage of the marketing opportunity. Stuffed to the brim inside, stacked and roped to the max on DIY roof racks, across all manner of crippling roads and weather conditions, and somehow these ol’ rustbuckets trundle on, lifeblood of Senegalese transport.
Out….
As we rumble slowly out of the vast lot, already my breathing is starting to space, and my muscles uncoil ndank ndank, little by little. I lean my head against the window, practically drinking in the exhaust-tinged air streaming through the crack. I gaze out at the taxis and motobikes and storefronts sliding by and suddenly, déjà vu floods over — a frequent occurrence as of late. I’ve seen and done a great many things over two stints in Senegal, the first one nearly four years ago but still so visceral in memory and in refraction this second one. A look, a sound, a taste, a feeling, that’s all it takes.
Now I’m back in Dakar, a 20-year-old college junior slumped heavily against a taxi window, zipping along the Atlantic coast as sharp briny air ripples over the glass and slicks my hair back. It’s been one of those something-to-write-home-about kinds of days: we’re at the tail end of a serious dust storm, and returning from a class visit to one of Dakar’s poorest, most polluted neighborhoods. Images of the day run rough-shot through my head. I’m sensory overloaded, shellshocked, and breathing heavily through my first-ever N95, an eery foreshadow of just a month later when the world would shut down…
In….
In American terms, this is not a long voyage, a quick 100-mile (160km) hop between Kaolack and Thiès. But time and distance operate on different rules in these parts. Out here in Senegal’s “Peanut Basin” — a uniquely beautiful but somewhat forlorn flat expanse of sparse, tough vegetation and grand, gnarled baobabs polka-dotting the landscape — reality gets warped a bit in the liminal space between villages.
In some ways, it’s a microcosm of the nation’s liminal biogeographic place in the world. Most of Senegal is located in the Sahel, the continent-wide, semi-arid transition band of steppe and woodland sandwiched between the arid Sahara and humid equatorial tropics. Senegal has a good primary road system, but even so, the brutal extremes take their toll on all involved — driver, traveler, vehicle, road — and trips simply go slower.
Out….
So as we pull onto the N1 highway and leave Kaolack behind, I know I’ve got several hours on my hands (barring any breakdowns which no part of me can afford to manifest). The whoosh of the wind and steady thump-thump of the tires are soothing, and finally after a few minutes, I feel calm enough to close my eyes. As images of the morning seem imprinted to my eyelids, I once again turn to my other senses.
Tremors and wails of Wolof spill forth from the radio, which the driver has cranked to cut through the wind. Backed by ferocious polyrhythmic drum beats (known as sabar), peppered with Alhamdulillah and other exultations, I can’t make out the artist, but it’s a classic mbalax-style Senegalese sound. The acrid exhaust-and-dust tang of the Kaolack air has somewhat left my tongue, though all but two of us keep masks firmly cinched to our faces when I peek around. The poor lady next to me must have forgotten one, and looks rightfully mal à l’aise, clutching the sparkly pink-and-white folds of her dress over her nose and mouth.
Closing my eyes again, I try to tune it all out, even my own thoughts and senses. Everything but my breath.
In…
Out….
In….…
Out….…
In….…….
Out……..….
Soon I slip into a drowsy, half-sleep state, and for the first time in almost two hours, the mechanics of my own lungs slip once more into their rightful background place. The relief I feel is hard to describe, an almost primal release. Feeling a bit assaulted, though, by the din of wind and radio, I dig awkwardly in the backpack still weighing down my thighs like a small child, and slip in noise-cancelling earbuds.
As chill sounds of R&B, jazz, and Afrobeats wash over, I gaze out blearily a while longer at the lunar-esque landscape — solitary trees and scrub brush the only visible life on these pockmarked plains, save some vultures riding currents high, high above. I’ve always liked imagining when traveling the highway that the world is, in fact, moving while you remain stationery, the car a mere prop on a soundstage, bouncing gently on hydraulics.
But in truth, life has been much the opposite of this these past few months. Because while the world I come from and know best has stayed pretty much the same — friends, family, and communities doing much the same things, same jobs, similar routines, places, challenges, understandings, and dreams — my world has changed in ways I struggle to articulate.
“I’m having an amazing time. It’s challenging and so humbling. I wish I could describe it better to you guys. But I don’t know how. It’s something you just have to experience…”
The best I can offer most of the time are anecdotes. Stories and memories are, in a way, our humanity itself — storytelling defines and differs us. Because without actually living in — and living out — another place and culture, surrendering as best you can to the trials and beauties of being foreign to them, stories are how we teach each other the world, and what we’ve seen and know of it.
So as these thoughts run by in succession, my breath again catches, but for a different reason. Much of the day’s anxiety shape-shifts into sudden emotion, and now it’s nostalgia’s turn to coast over the window and knock me to the headrest. It feels a different kind, though. I’m nostalgic by nature, and draw often on past memories — both great and painful — to nourish the present and inform the future. But this time seems tinged with something else: a kind of future nostalgia I can’t yet put my finger on.
So I lean into the past first, tilting my head back, zoning out, and letting moments from all across these crazy months bubble up naturally and play out like movie splices.
I see a steaming silver platter of ceebujen, bodies crowded around expectantly…
Bismillah, my host dad murmurs, and the rest of us follow suit in a staggered echo: Bismillah, Bismillah…
Only us men and boys are out here on the gold-and-white tiled porch, circled under a sliver of shade from the overhung roof. It’s a conservative norm that my family follows — the women eat separately in the open-air hallway, just steps from my bedroom curtain. We play a daily dance: they offer and I try to politely refuse the spoon and wooden stool symbolic for guests.
But no, deedeet, deedeet, amul solo — it’s no problem, my hospitable family insists without fail. It’s teranga in action, a crowning value of Senegalese culture.
Bismillah. The ceebujen calls, and we dig in hungrily. Perhaps fried fish, broken tomato-red rice, rich sauces, and stewed vegetables beckon differently at this hour. Perhaps everyone is their most fatigued under the unrelenting early-afternoon sun. Perhaps it’s just customary. But the scalding air is split only by spoons clicking, the scritch of fingers balling up bites, and mouths chewing.
Time slows. At first I find the silence deafening, but come not to mind. Eating becomes a kind of communal prayer: each connected but absorbed in their experience, such that you’re equally grounded but lost, and for a moment the earth may well have quit turning, until the spell is broken, you finish in your own time, stand up, break the circle, and for me at least, immediately search out a long nap.
I see ice-cold Gazelles, green glass bottles sweating onto stiff plastic tablecloths…
The name is Church and the communing frequent, but the place is a bar and conversation the prayer. A true hole-in-the-wall joint: white plastic chairs, beer stacked in a giant cooler, just one TV bolted over the bar typically flashing European football or French-dubbed movies. We quickly become regulars — it’s our favorite place to blow off steam after busy hours of training, and demanding days away from Thiès at our community sites.
We play cards, we smoke cheap cigarettes, we practice Wolof or Sereer or Pulaar with the locals, we laugh a ton, we’re probably too loud, we forget for a while that we’re some 4000-plus miles from home, and that even if we are who the fuck cares, because what a crazy adventure we’re on and how fortunate we are to live this life, knocking back brews and scarfing plates of fried pork in far-flung places like Anthony Bourdain, these parts unknown becoming less and less so with each passing memory forever tying us to them.
I see all around the training center, the early mornings to the late nights…
It’s just past 1am, but over on the basketball court, laughter and cheers ring out — one last game of “Lightning” turned into three. Perfect temps, star-crusted sky, a ball and two brand-new hoops, maybe a couple drinks in from Church, what more can anyone want… We’ll pay for it in the morning, oh I know that, dragging my tired ass through the demands of another training day.
But it’s hard not to be a touch romantic about moments like these — cherished and fleeting, 32 strangers brought together and bonded so strongly, so uniquely, but soon to spread out and regather fully only a few times over two years. So indeed the TTC late nights are a must: raining down 3’s, hammocking, watching movies and dancing and hosting jam sessions in the Disco Hut.
And at some point, some nights, I may find myself sprawled on the cool linoleum floor of the admin building, soaking in remnant A/C and clinging to decent Wifi — sweaty and exhausted but struck by a sudden urge to WhatsApp call home and tell them all about it.
I see a bowl of cubed watermelon, backdropped by plumes of noxious smoke…
It’s watermelon season, I’m told, cheap and plentiful, so most nights find my new host mom squatted on the intricate blue and white porch tiles, laying waste to one of those suckers. She makes it look unbelievably easy — a master of the filet knife, fruit ninja-ing the mottled green rind back-and-forth as if it were a warm ball of butter. Save the mosquitoes, this can be the best time of day, so whether I sit with my family outside or in the covered entryway to my bedroom, invariably a bowl of the good stuff will soon appear.
All too often, however, I’m inside, door closed, metal slat windows shut tight, a mask on my face. Neighborhood trash burnings happen with alarming frequency, alarmingly close to my family’s compound. Though it sucks, that it happens isn’t too surprising. I knew before, but have been reminded viscerally, just how entrenched pollution is in Senegal. From air to water to (especially) plastic to industrial to unidentifiable, it’s impossible to avoid.
It makes me concerned for the coming decades here — in light of globally — and the coming intersections of social, economic, ecological polycrises. Senegal has a rapidly expanding, extremely young demographic on the cusp of even greater population boom — none deserving of life consigned to an evermore degraded world.
So when I get a knock on my door, and find watermelon left kindly on the porch table, yet backdropped by billows of noxious smoke over the rooftops, the scene I take in is like a poisoned apple, ripe with dichotomies: sweet injected with rotten, healthy shadowed by sickening, content intertwined with unease, belonging underlaid by mal du pays — a nagging pain of country that simply won’t go away.
I see makeshift stools arranged on a rooftop, a circle of friends lit up by moonlight…
What a great place for a breather, much needed on a night like this. We’ve gathered in a corner of my neighbor’s rooftop: myself and four cohort friends, one of whom lives here and all together a tight-knit group after weeks spent living and learning in our host community. This is our final stay here, and it’s bittersweet, much more than I anticipated.
Below us, an engagement party pulses with movement and noise. Ryan’s host cousin will soon be married, and dozens of family and community members have showed up in their finest cloth to celebrate her. We’re hungry and tired from the constant greeting and interacting, even more so as a gang of toubabs who can’t avoid being a traveling spectacle.
But as we lean over the concrete parapet, chatting and surveying our neighboring garden plot in the post-twilight glow, out comes the best surprise. Two steaming trays of yassa ginaar, delivered by Ryan’s host mom. Spiced, tender chicken smothered with caramelized, lime-drenched onions on a bed of vermicelli noodles. We practically trip over ourselves in thanks.
Sometimes simple moments really are the most beautiful, and this is surely one: eating and eating what may as well be the best food of your life, perched up high with friends under the biggest sky, while the world under you reverbs with the joyous sounds of a culture you’re just happy to be a small part of, no matter how long that may last…
I wake with a start some time later, having fallen asleep at the end of this marathon montage. We’ve stopped along the side of the road, likely flagged down by a policeman as the driver looks annoyed and is groping around the center console for his IDs and money pouch. Indeed, a stoic gendarmerie officer in blue-black fatigues strides up to the window and, without a word of exchange, the driver gets out, following him to the armored pickup across the road.
Whether it’s illegal-but-all-too-common bribery or state-sanctioned road tariffs, I don’t know (though I have a hunch). But from what I’ve seen of these exchanges, sometimes money slips discreetly, sometimes drivers get off scot-free, and there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme or reason to who gets pulled over in the first place. It goes without a hitch, though, and with only some grumbles when the pirated captain re-helms his ship, we’re off.
Having exhausted enough of the past for today, I think again about the future. It’s been jumbled and confused lately, what I envision for mine. But it’s indeed been telling in these recent days that the future I feel most drawn to resides outside of Senegal.
It’s five days before Christmas, three months since the launch of it all, and at this point, I’ve more or less decided that my time here is coming to a close. I’ve been struggling with the relentless extremes of the climate — to the point that, even though physically I could probably muscle through two years here, I know somewhere deep within that I won’t be happy. And that if I’m consistently battling my physical and mental health, then I won’t bring to myself or my Peace Corps and Senegalese communities what each deserve.
Add that on top of some other personal and family factors at play, and much more is stacked on the side of leaving than staying. Plus, though I’m not a huge believer of cosmic signs, there’s one moment I just find hard to reconcile.
It was my first-ever day visiting Birkilane, my permanent host site. I had taken a car from nearby Kaffrine with my community counterpart, and we stopped at the edge of town to transfer to a taxi. Stepping out, a young guy in a Milwaukee Bucks jersey strolled past towards the gas station. I did a double-take and smiled, calculating the long odds of Giannis Antetokounmpo crossing me at that very moment. Easy to write off as a coincidence, though.
But as the taxi pulled up a few minutes later, I couldn’t help thinking about it. The driver hopped out to grab our bags, and still I was distracted. At last, I took a good look at him. Instantly, despite the heat, goosebumps prick my arms, and an energy flickers up my spine. I’m left well and truly speechless… oh my god, is that… he’s wearing a Bucks hat. What the fuck. The odds are astronomical. The first minutes in my new home, and I get two straight signs of my hometown, from the first two people I ever encounter.
Even now in the sept-place, I have to shake my head. Of course it’s not a deciding factor, but if for some reason I needed one final nudge from the universe… well, I got it.
At last, the liminal space between villages begins to crunch, signaling that Thiès is fast-approaching. Fifteen minutes later, traffic slows to a crawl — we’re in the city proper. We’ve all been called back to the training center for a time-sensitive COVID booster, spending a long weekend before returning to site on Christmas Eve. I know this is likely my final (foreseeable) time in Thiès, so as we traverse the city en route to le garage Thiès-Dakar, I start to commit as much as possible to memory. The unmatched hustle-and-bustle of the narrow market alleys. The frozen faces and expressions of countless passing strangers, each webbed in their own universe. The humming energy, at once invigorating and draining, of these vibrant streets that simply feel so alive.
Ultimately, the end of the odyssey is unceremonious — it takes two seconds out of the sept-place for me and my bags to be swept up by a waiting taxi driver. I could bargain harder for 700 or 800 francs, but today, 1000 works just perfect. In a blur, we make it to the TTC, I’m through the gates, and just minutes later, collapse on my bed.
I remember very clearly one thought crossing my mind:
Holy shit, I need to write about this.
And then it all fades to black.
I decided not to break my news right away — waiting until I arrive in Dakar a few days before my Dec. 30th flight. I wanted to enjoy the heck out of Thiès with everyone, and that’s exactly what we did. Even so, making it official is hard, really hard — but the support and love I receive means so much. I also had an idea of what would await across the Atlantic: a jarring transition, reverse culture shock, a couple months of feeling split between worlds.
And so, three months later, here we are. Recently, I read a quote from an ecologist and author named Alexa Firmenich which encapsulates so many of these feelings — from both now and then. Following a stint in Morocco, she describes experiencing a beautifully bittersweet thing:
“Nostalgia for a time I feel I have known but cannot be a part of, because I ache to live a thousand lives but to live each is a lifetime.”
I will miss, and am missing, the lifetime not lived in Senegal, but take so much from the thousand mini lives I did. I do ache for those times I have known, and all those which simply feel out of reach. Life, I guess, is mysterious that way. Three months can be a few breaths, a day within them can last an eon — or vice versa. Some chapters you’re in the right place at the wrong time. Other chapters the ideal time but not quite the right place. And some fit so right it just couldn’t be any other way. So it goes, so it goes…
Four years ago, I had a realization about my time in Senegal that I’ve thought of often. This is what I wrote:
“Innumerable paths have wound and converged to bring me here; a watershed moment in my life just as for this nation. My crossroads, Senegal’s crossroads, briefly overlaid. Sooner than I realize, these roads will diverge once more.”
This time isn’t so different — a beautiful convergence, another crossroads, and for now, a divergence.
But there’s true peace in that. Because no matter to which life you get pulled, where life winds, I believe you can keep who, and where, and how, and with whom you ever were along for the ride.
With Peace Corps, with Senegal, that’s certainly what I forever hope to do.
Post-Script Note (4/5/24): Typically I’d stick this up top, but it felt right like this. If you made it this far, thank you! I know this was a long one, but there’s so much I had to say.
There’s a lot I’m still figuring out for this next phase that’s opened up after Peace Corps, but it’s exciting. I’m home living in Milwaukee for now, but moving back to the Twin Cities this fall. In the meantime, I’m excited to head to New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado from mid-April to mid-May on my fourth “Canoemobile” tour for Wilderness Inquiry, and waiting to hear on a summer internship at Milwaukee’s Urban Ecology Center. And I’ve begun to look at grad school starting in 2025 — following the writing path — for environmental journalism.
Jake Marble 
Your words not only transported me to Senegal, but are a wonderful example of how much travel impacts us! Beautifully expressed.
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Beautiful writing – I felt like I was there with you. Thank you for that.
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A powerful, powerful piece. The fact that you are going into environmental journalism gives me hope because there are so many stories there that also need a powerful telling.
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