Return to Africa

I'm at the Hotel Ganale working on some emails and getting articles.
Free wi-fi here. I used to come here as a volunteer, and nothing has
changed. The same tall, thin bartender pours drinks, a small plate of
peanuts and pickled vegetables comes free with a drink, the same European dance songs play endlessly on a loop. It's truly bizarre being back
here, scenery the same, and I so different. I feel more like
a stranger, yet so much more comfortable. Before, this felt like
such a foreign place, and absolutely overwhelming. I was so involved
with the culture and enamored with the people. Every experience stuck
to me, and I absorbed everything, reacting constantly. Now I am just a
visitor, albeit an experienced one. I observe. I act on the surface.
And honestly, I enjoy it more now. A strange sort of homecoming.

Things have changed here: some are better and some are worse. The city
seems cleaner, with less garbage on the streets and fewer aggressive
street-hawkers. At night though, the face changes. Both women and men
find space on the sidewalk to sleep, shoulder to shoulder, on strips
of cardboard. If they had anything to steal, it would be gone by
morning, picked off by those even more ravenous. But what they have
they wear on their bodies, use for a pillow, wrap themselves in for
protection against the heavy, tropical night.

I still find the contrasts shameful. Barriers of glass protect big
screen tvs, air conditioning and expensive alcohol from the squalor
just outside. The wealthy sometimes have to step over the
bodies of homeless sleepers in order to enter nightclubs
and bars. Is there any evidence that things are getting better here?
Or is Africa just entering a further stage of exhaustion?

So, I'll stay here my two months gathering data, treading across the
skin of this country, and probably never again experience it as deeply
as before. Time passes and my world is changing, interests and tastes
evolving toward different frontiers. It seems sure though that, if I
return again to Senegal, it will still show the same bittersweet face
that it does to me now.