9/16/2023 0 Comments Electronicsandbooks air navigation![]() ![]() It was a feeling that I would revisit a few years later when I returned home to the United States. I was disoriented by the enormous change in my surroundings, having left the fall breezes and perpetual city light of Chicago for Senegal’s capital city. We rumbled towards Thies, where we were to spend the next three months training as either rural health or small business volunteers. The moisture clung to the filthy, decrepit buildings, slums, and shacks that lined the route nationale, allowing only for a chorus of insects to emerge from the tropical soup as we left Dakar. Piling into this colorful, rattling tin can with my colleagues, I felt overwhelmed by the stifling heat and the nearly consummate darkness of the city. Windowless and beaten by the Dakar traffic, the sun, and the Sahelian sand, these so-called car rapides were affectionately named “Alhums” by Peace Corps volunteers because they were always decorated with the word Alhumdulilahi, or “Thanks be to God”-a thought that any passenger surely had if he managed to safely arrive at his destination in one. Little orange, white, and blue “Alhums” cut through the mayhem and pulled up to the curb. Beggars and taxi drivers surrounded our group of thirty-four, “Madame! Madame! Taxi?” “Donne-moi une petite pièce!” The silence of the airport’s interior left us unprepared for the market-like atmosphere that awaited us immediately outside. The only signs of life emerged from the tired, but deadly serious and armed customs agents who insisted on searching my tightly packed and somewhat disorganized bags. O’Hare and JFK seemed like urban metropolises compared to the Dakar airport nearly empty, the building was a densely humid, sleepy village whose single convenience store and restaurant were closed for the night. I lugged an enormous suitcase and backpack into the tram that carried us across the landing pad to the terminal. The cabin doors opened, and the city greeted us with the sound of farm animals mingled with the weight of the muggy night air, the ocean, and distant traffic, an illusion that masked the reality of the urban sprawl that surrounded us. Having traversed the nocturnal waters of the Atlantic, our plane descended upon the capital city, its sparse lights glittering along the coast and the nearby Île de Gorrée as if lava were streaming down a recently erupted volcano. Landing in Dakar airport, the Air Afrique flight from New York hummed into the humid night air. Of starlit huts and Sahelian sand January 22, 2017īy Ferdinand Reus, originally posted to Flickr ![]()
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