Dakar

I really wish I cared about contraceptive prevalence. A couple of official meetings today and lots of talk with the folks from the "sister organization" we're working with here. Mostly talking about who knows whom, who's done what where. "Did you know X, who worked for USAID in Ghana and then for XYZ in Mali? Well, she left ABC last year and now she's the COP at DEF in Ethiopia." "Oh really, then she must know Y, whom I worked with at RST in Burundi." Blah blah blah.

Dakar seems kinda cool, though I haven't seen much of it. The traffic sucks, like most cities in the developing world. But it's on the ocean, which always helps. The road from the suburb where I'm staying to the city goes along a lovely stretch of beach, where many many hotels are under construction. At one curve, there is a big, colorful mosque, right on the beach--what a cool place to pray!

This evening I had a free hour before dinner, so I strolled down the road from my hotel to the Pointe des Almadies, the westernmost point in Africa. Confusingly, the actual point was not marked anywhere, not even a sign that I noticed. There was a parking lot, a beach, a few restaurants, and an "artisans market" for the tourists. I spotted a peninsula jutting out in the right direction, so I walked toward it. But when I got close, I realized that it was inside a Club Med, not open to the public. Is it possible that the government of Senegal has allowed this point to be on private land?

Apparently, such geographic trivia is not as important to the Senegalese (at least based on my sample size of one). When I asked Abdoulaye, my colleague here, about it he said he had never thought about where the exact point was. And then he said he thought the US embassy should purchase the land and turn in into a park. Huh??