Finding My Way

I am having to learn a lot more than new vocabulary these days. I have to learn an entire new system. For example, our house doesn't have a street nor an address. I can say who our neighbors are or perhaps, eventually, how to get here, but that means nothing to the moving company shipping all of our things over. So how does one communicate one's new location? By either one of two methods.

For those in the ex-pat community you refer to the previous tenants. For example, you are the Johnsons but the house was previously occupied by the Williams' so your address would be your neighborhood, Johnson X (as in ex- or former) Williams. Or you can give your neighborhood, then your parcel #, your zone # and your house #. This seems to be what the movers wanted though no one else in Dakar would have an idea of how to get here based on that. And as far as I know MapQuest and GoogleMaps don't work for Dakar.

So what happens if you are new to Dakar and have never been to the Johnson X Williams house but need to get there? You give the kind of directions that can only be given in a developing country. Example: take the airport road, turn right at the pharmacy next to the French butcher, then first left onto dirt road, and we're the fourth gate on your left, if you pass the woman at the fruit stand you've gone too far. One would reasonably ask several questions here: isn't the airport road pretty long with perhaps many pharmacies on it? What is the name of the pharmacy? How will I know it's a French butcher and not a Senegalese butcher? What if the fruit stand isn't there? What if it's a man at the fruit stand the day I go? Yet somehow there is only one spot on the airport road where a pharmacy and a butcher shop co-exist side by side, so you assume it's a French one; and the woman at the fruit stand will always be there and she'll probably even point you to the gate/garage you're looking for. Amazing, but it works once you figure out the main roads and the road to the airport is always a main road.

Gusi will surely be bewildered by all the organization there is in the US when we go back for vacation. I can already tell this experience is going to enhance my creative juices more than I could have ever imagined.