Merigoesaround

Wael talked with the frankness of a good man: "in Egypt you can have food or freedom, but not both. With Moubarak we had food, with Mosi we had some freedom and with the current President, Sisi, we have again something to eat, but we better don't talk". His law degree at Al-Azhar university got him a job as a driver for a development organization, he seemed happy but I thought a good thinker was fighting against traffic instead of fighting injustices at trials. The walk through Khan Al Khalili market was very pleasant, despite the corporate look, including heels, that my friend and I were sporting.  The best was yet to come. Friends for life know you and share the need for memorable moments that keep bonding you to each other: watching the pyramid of Giza at night from the Carter suite at Mena House Hotel was one. We could barely see it but my imagination and google did the rest. Suddenly, that moment and our laughs counted more than the centuries of history hidden in...

My daily taxi rides are full of discoveries. I love negotiating the price, listening to the news and exchanging views with my rudimentary wolof. Telling the drivers to go 'ndank ndank' when they speed and to increase the volume when Youssou N'dour is on. This morning the taxi man was shaving while driving and sharing his views on the ban to distribute Charlie Hebdos in Senegal. What a multitasker. YouTube Video - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone Location: Rue Aime Cesaire,Dakar,Senegal

For some weeks every year Dakar is an extremely dusty place. The air and the sand of the Sahara reach the peninsula of Cape Vert covering all surfaces with zillions of dust particles. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone Location: Avenue Du PR. L. Sedar Senghor,Dakar,Senegal

New Year, new experimenting...I am learning that detoxifying on a liquid-only diet might not be for me. This week I ate baby food for 36 hours and I craved the crunchiest thing you could imagine, from chips to a 'pain au raisins' from our local bakery. There are two camps, or multiple, but at least at my office women in camp 1 swear that drinking water only and doing internal cleansing with enemas (aaaargh) works wonders, and camp 2 believes is all fad. This  article  claims that diet and sports, not detox, is what one should do. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone Location: Rue Aime Cesaire,Dakar,Senegal

Boyfriend Husband (BH) pampered me with a little grigri from the Souk that subtlety adorns my wrist and gives me extra powers. Wohoo. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone Location: Marrakech Médina,Morocco

The year starts with bad news, big dreams and lots of planning. Bad news in France and in the world, where the extremism of some destroy the peacefulness of all. Big dreams as we start a new year full of adventures in Dakar and beyond. And lots of planning to keep living life fully. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone Location: Marrakech Médina,Morocco

Cocktail season is here. During the last years of expatriation there are some things that have become traditions for BH and I when we celebrate national days: We dress in  blue  for the Day of Europe We dress in  orange  for Koninginedag Day I dress in  red  for the Spanish Day Cocktails used to be fun networking occasions and I would enjoy getting all put together, hold the arm of my man and socialise all night long, but the emptiness of the conversations and the repetition of the sentences, hihowareyouwheredoyouworkwhendidyouarrive, starts making me feel that, or I am getting older or cocktails are getting worse. I think the latter, look at my perfect cleavage in the picture, not a single wrinkle. There are some things I have learned in those nights. 4 mainly: Eat before going. Really, the little gouda piece you are going to fight for or the slice of ham (never ever good ham) are not worth it. Also, save yourself the calories, those fl...

From Vilakazi Road one can see the twin towers of Johannesburg (one pictured). They bring you back to the time when the sky of that city was polluted with the fumes of the coal mines and its land was poisoned by the injustices of apartheid. Vilakazi Road is said to be the only street in the world where 2 Nobel Prizes ever lived (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu). Today there is little of that Nobel spirit, a fried chicken place in the corner, American-styled coffee terraces for visitors and terrible handcrafts are all you can find. And then, further away, the twin towers and then skyscrapers from Joburg downtown. Two cities in one. Still divided. Like twins that ignore each other.

A carrousel or merry-go-round is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating circular platform with seats for riders. So your meri was going around another type of carrousels...the baggage ones at the airport of Johannesburg looking for a stranded conference banner suspected to be a weapon. A development aid missile, I thought. Sometimes going around at airports one learns lots. I like to guess nationalities, languages, and destinations. Boyfriend husband and I often compete to know which language the couple sitting in front of us in the plane speaks: Hungarian!?, Finnish!?  Other than languages and nationalities one can learn a lot on how not to behave at airports. A mix of arrogance and bully attitude often makes me feel some people should really stay at home so I can seat and enjoy the ride. The conference banner, a.k.a, development weapon, was in carousel #7 so there I headed determined to take it and go to the hotel, when I found myself surrounded by the pa...

Toc, toc, toc, toc. Again and again. For a month and a half. This is how long my bed spread took to be woven in a village close to Korogho.  Thread after thread, the hands of anonymous women and adolescents crafted what today covers me at night. My bed spread is a rarity, which gives me a bitter sweet comfort/discomfort. It appears that West African cotton (11% of the world's cotton) is the best quality cotton in the world. The fact that it is picked by hand, instead of by ugly machines, apparently makes the difference. However, while some primary processing is done in Cote d'Ivoire (seed cotton is converted to lint in gins located near farms in rural areas) the conversion of cotton lint to thread, textiles and clothing is mostly done elsewhere. And that noise, the toc, toc the beating that feeds the heart of local economies is little by little fading away, just like a distant scary dream under a bed spread.

The end of the mango season approaches in Ivory Coast. Small mountains of that fruit decorate the two sides of the road. Seydou, the driver, stops to buy some kilos for his relatives in the city. The image captivates the foreign eye. Mangoes, women, colorful bubus , dancing children, red sand. The dynamism, vitality, and resilience of Africa all at once, just outside the window of the car. I hide my phone and try to turn the beauty into a picture. Eh tooii !! (Hey you!) somebody screams at me.  You are beautiful . I say in French. Merci . She answers. Smiling, she runs back to the fruit mountain, a new buyer approaches. It is the end of the mango season.

He had divorced a year ago. That arranged marriage should have never happened. The way to forget and to run away from the gossip was to go abroad, he thought...and this is how Colonel Maj Khan found himself heading a mission of Blue Helmets in Korogho, Northern Ivory Coast. He had always had a taste for adventure and that had brought him to join the intelligence unit of the Pakistani army. Then marriage, followed by drama. And then there we were, sitting in what looked to me, and probably was, a private jet from the UN. For a second I thought of my mum, who has no grand children to show to the neighbors, but plenty of pictures of meri going around. Meri was there to interview cotton farmers. The Colonel was there to forget. Coincidentally he was thousands of miles away from the gossip, from the woman that made the last 5 years of his life so miserable, but close to the softness of cotton. That softness he had known so well, growing in a family of cotton farmers in Southern...

After a far too long African winter with loads of wind, warm weather is finally arriving to the Cape Verde Peninsula, the piece of rock that Dakar occupies. And with the raising sea water temperature, groups of adolescents start invading what is theirs: the beaches of the Peninsula. Some are there to learn how to swim, others to practice Senegalese wrestling or play soccer, but most of them want to see and be seen. The mostly male crowd that invades the sand is occassionally spiced up by the overtly sexyness of few girls. Some wear headscarves and clothes while they bath, others tiny bikinis, many a combination of bra-turned-swimming suit and short skirts. And the beach boys look, and the girls smile. The beach radiates adolescence and energy, a captivating hormone circus that beats any good book in this hot afternoon.

Malick's fingers tell stories. Each of his 10 fingers, his 10 disfigured nails and his damaged fingerprints have spent most of Malick's life holding the sowtah, the traditional tool used by Senegalese woodcarvers to cut away parts of wood and shape it into mysterious pieces of art. Malick's eyes tell stories too. Some happy but most sad ones. Like the day he fell in love with that American student who spent few nights of her internship sleeping in his atelier at the Village des Arts. Side by side. He thought she loved him. She only wanted to write about the lawbe , the caste group in Wolof society that includes all crafstmen that work with wood, like Malick.  He does not like white girls that much anymore. They bring all type of temptations and are interested. Sweet-faced manipulators to whom he can succumb. His art is already a difficult fit under Islam, which denounces all type of sculpted forms, d...

I have not blogged for a while. This saddens me. Merigoesaround is settled in Dakar...but she still goes around quite a lot so I will be reconnecting with my dear blog in the next days. This blog was my best friend for years, capturing the fun, the less fun and my way of seeing the world. It is like a good old friend, one of those that never complains even if you don't call. But now I am going home, today is my 2-year wedding anniversary and BH has organized a surprise, it involves taking a boat, so I do not want to miss that boat.  

Half yoursie! Happy 2014. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad Location: Cape Verde

RFI musique coolness  had impregnated each corner of our living room when BH looked over his laptop screen and prompted me to dress up immediately. "Wear a boubou", he said. I jumped into one of my Ivorian dresses and off we headed to Boubacar's house to celebrate the fact that Abraham sacrified an animal instead of his own son. When we arrived, la Directrice Generale, a.k.a. Boubacar's wife, was in the kitchen surrounded by pots, pans and meat, lots of fresh meat. Tabaski is not for animal huggers or those who faint when they see blood. I growed up watching bullfighting with my grandparents and I felt a sort of blood connection to Boubacar's family as soon as we entered his place. The smell of burning animal skin and the amount of kids running around the sacrifice reminded me of la matanza (literally, 'the killing') of the pork. My family would do it every single year around Easter. I remember being terrified by a 200kg pig leaving ...

Your bespectacled smiley soul wanders around the Westgate mall on this Monday morning. Laughing, cracking jokes and intellectual remarks all at the same time, looking at girls, despite your love for the one who broke your heart and moved to the other side of Africa. Perhaps she did not love you enough. Maybe you deserved better. We will never know. Our friendship was about coincidences and short intense moments. Too short. About the coincidence of being at the same place for the same purpose in Kigali, where we met 2 years ago. About the coincidence that your name, Ravi, means happy in French, and that is what your presence or correspondence made me feel. About you being from Port of Spain and me from Spain. About the moment we enjoyed Maia's music together in that bar in Nairobi few months back. She sang the song of that little girl who was looking for her mum during the 98 bombings of the US Embassy. Today I am that...

So much water in the streets, so little water in the taps. Half of Dakar has been dry for the last 5 days. Lucky us live by the President's Palace, so probably just like him we barely realize what others are going through down there. YouTube Video - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Development is also time saved to accomplish a given task. Dakar is an even better place to be since the motorway to the Petite Cote opened a couple of months ago. Trips to Saly, Popenguine and other wonderful little fishing towns around the coast are now less than an hour away (before = 3 hours). Going out of Dakar gives me peace. I suddenly feel the air that I breath gets thinner, cleaner and lung-purifing. Life outside the capital suddenly unveils color, smiles and a festive mood. Genuine and simple. Like a good grilled fish by the lagoon. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad