Thursday

Longest day of work by far with the most
concentration and debate.  My head
is cabbaged by the end.  Out to the
pool and swim but it’s hard work. The week is catching up with me, the food and
the Powerpoint eight hours a day. Feel very sluggish. But better in the end for
exercise.

Meet everyone in the lobby and back in the
minibus for another meal at Just 4 U – same place as Carey and I visited on
Monday night. Good company and good conversation, very friendly finished in the
bar with Finnish and Mexican colleagues. Very tired and sporting my first bite
as it turns out.  Very, very
disappointed not to have seen any live music in one of the great music cities
of the world.  Combination of bad
timing and punishing Powerpoint schedule.

 

Friday

Another long day of Powerpoint and debate
but constructive with much agreement in the end on contentious issues.  Skype with home and feel generally
homesick. Out in the evening for meal in local restaurant with Bernardo, Lucia,
Savitha and Linda.  Great
atmosphere, plastic tablecloths and locals plus backpackers.  Unfortunately is the start of a long
nightmare of a night for me –being really unwell all night. Cannot figure out
what in particular it was going through me but is vicious.

 

Saturday

Manage to persuade myself I am well enough
to join the trip to Goree Island , museum and monument to slavery. Out in cabs
to the port a short distance away. 
Really very hot, my first time out in the morning African heat.  Onto the boat and over the short calm
crossing to Goree.  Could not be more
different from Dakar – no cars, older buildings, feel of rural Africa, kids
swimming off the shore as we arrive.

Familiar Dakar hassle starts as soon as we
step ashore but we have a guide who launches into a history of the island and
sweeps us up in his passionate description of the place.  An island of 1500 souls, 1000 Muslim,
500 Christian in harmony.

Commemorates the various slave activities from 1536
to 1848, the shameful acts of English, Dutch, Portuguese and French over those
generations.  And of the tribes who
collaborated. 15 – 20 men shackled in a room no bigger than the smallest room
in a suburban house. Holding pens to fatten them up for dispatch to the
Caribbean and to Brazil. 

Their
identities gone – families split and renamed, father to Martinique maybe,
mother to Brazil, children somewhere else.  The rest is genuinely moving, contemplative like a chapel, a
monument to reconciliation.  The
last sight of Africa for many of the enslaved. 

I have now been to museums on each point of the slave triangle
which tell this story in a way everyone should see at some point in their
lives if they can -visit the one nearest to you…  Goree opposite Dakar, a
museum in Charleston SC and the one in Liverpool.

 

Wander in the heat, soaked in sweat, buy
one or two things from the many who approach, feeling very, very unwell again
by now.  Another calm crossing and
a cab ride back to the Pullman to rest and try to get well enough to fly home…