….or you could say je marche un peu, I’m doing alright, sénégalaisement, plus ou moins, or not too bad.

In any case, as a bread and spread Westerner, I don’t think you could ever respond to an inquiry on your overall state of being in Senegal as anything more than “it isn’t all sucking/it isn’t all fantastic”.

I was going to complain about the traffic. But to be more specific, I’d like to gripe about these guys:

See the blue shirt? This means that these people are paid to direct traffic. In my opinion, just because you are a salaried employee doesn’t mean you were ever trained on how to direct traffic.

The street in front of my house is a mess. I probably bring it up more often than you would like, but it’s a daily reality that affects not only me, but my friends and the gobs of other people who must negotiate this corridor everyday.  Everyone is used to the six-month old (so far) construction zone, and it is only on rare occasions where the dreaded blue smock brigade comes out that life becomes horrendous for motorists.

While jousting in said traffic this morning, my excellent toubab friend Laurie offered some deceptively simple insight into living in Dakar. “You just have to understand that every time you get into your car it is going to be an adventure!”  She doesn’t say this with happy enthusiasm for what is to come, but rather as an exclamation that bears legitimate consideration. She’s also at the wheel of her car and we are at a complete stop for a needlessly long time as the traffic is snarled due to the usual suspects.

Two roads diverged by a dude in blue.  Damn.

So not everything works correctly in Dakar, and for that I say my life is kind of working here, or as best as one can expect. But I don’t say this with disdain or even try to say that such realities are limited to Senegal, West Africa, or even developing countries.

We, the United States, mess stuff up plenty good too (don’t make me start blogging about sub-prime mortgages).  Even though I am lucky enough to wrap myself in the security blanket that is the U.S. community here, I am still reminded that we are nowhere near perfect.  We may have non-human traffic control measures that can properly regulate circulation flow, but our humans mess stuff up too:

Can you read this? It’s from a package I got in the pouch today.

For those of you who have sent me care packages, I thank you very much. If this is the case, you also know that my address is Dakar Place, and that the Diplomatic Pouch goes through a central sorting facility. This is a facility with real people inside doing the sorting.

Last week I learned that two of my faithfully-delivered packages went missing- with one eventually tracked down in Bangladesh. Bangladesh, you say? Where’s that?  I know my family probably has not much of an idea, so here are some obligatory maps:

 You get bonus points if you know what the capital is…

Can you see now how my package probably ended up in Bangladesh? Yep, human error misread my address as Dhaka and before I knew it, some lucky schmuck at the embassy in Bangladesh was going to be getting some nice online purchases.

So if you were paying attention you would have noticed that the sticker in my scanned photo above says “Mis-sent to Chennai India”. This is not Bangladesh. Almost as far away as Dhaka from Dakar, I still have no idea how this second package found itself in Chennai. Here is where CSI fails to provide a logical explanationi on how my stuff went bizarrely astray.

With all of that said and done it did take some time- but I did eventually get my packages.  Much like the flow of traffic here in Dakar, the system doesn’t always work in a linear fashion…but you will eventually get to where you need to be going.

So it’s been a good day, because for the most part things are working.