I’m home. Since Saturday, I’ve visited both my homes: the one where my parents live and the one where I attend school. In one, I lay facedown in the backyard, smelling the grass. In the other, I kissed the collegiate gothic bricks of Whitman, my residential college (or dorm).
But I really should back up. The now ex-WARCers arrived in Washington Dulles Airport Saturday morning around 9:45. All had only two-hour layovers and were convinced we would miss our connecting flights. But we were in Washington now, not Dakar, and two hours (added to a 45 minute early arrival) was more than enough time to get us through customs and immigration and security and to our terminal, where we discovered fast food restaurants galore. We stood in awe of how quickly Starbucks prepared customers’ skim chai tea lattes. I ordered a quesadilla just after 10:45 am and ran to my gate cackling with laughter when its box was placed in my hands. I beamed at everyone: the United Airlines employee who printed my boarding pass, the man behind me in line at the Mexican place. After four months of staring at the ground ahead of me as I walked, I had worried I wouldn’t be able to snap out of my paranoia. But no, here I was being anti-social by being overly friendly.
The WARCers all sat by my gate eating our morning fast food Mexican and drinking our inordinately complicated coffees and thinking every tubab we saw was a friend. Alison thought a girl wearing pink rain boots and leggings was her roommate. I thought a middle-aged woman with shoulder length brown hair was my mom. When I left to find a bathroom, I realized I had forgotten my toilet paper. Then I realized I wouldn’t need to bring my own.
Eventually everyone left for different gates and Alison and I boarded a plane for Newark and Alison commented that it was shorter to fly from Dakar to DC than it was to take a sept place (taxi) from Dakar to The Gambia for spring break. And I realized it took only a little longer to fly from DC to Newark than it did to walk home from WARC to Sacre-Coeur 3 after school each day. As the plane landed in Newark, I looked the window at the highways and factories and refineries and truck depots and thought how cute they all were. When I saw a white disembarkation staircase on the runway, for a second, I thought it was a goat.
Back home, I was overwhelmed by how green everything was. I could see about twenty different shades of green in my backyard alone. I always used to say that what I loved most about Dakar was the colors – of people’s clothing, of the trash on the side of the streets – but Dakar is so dusty brown compared to this vivacious green. After I smelled the grass in my backyard, I hugged the oak tree and petted the lettuce outside my front door. Later, when it started to rain (my first rain in four months), I ran to the front garden and danced.
After five days, I’m still forgetting that sinks have hot water taps. And towards the end of each shower, I still sit down in the tub and let the warm water fall on my head and think about how I’m essentially sitting under a waterfall. I don’t think I can describe it any better. The pleasure that most New Jerseyites would get from discovering a secret hidden waterfall, I now get from taking my morning shower.
I visited campus Tuesday. My friend David laughed when I thanked him for taking me home, when he had in fact driven me an hour away from my house. But Princeton is my home. Pretentious as it sounds, I feel as though I belong there. When people ask me about Dakar, my opening statement has come to be that I found it difficult to feel comfortable there. Not so on campus. Looking out the window from David’s quad, I watched guys pass bellow in twos and threes without my heart rate starting to elevate or my eyes darting to the ground. I no longer crossed to the opposite side of the road whenever even a single man approached. I could wait outside East Pyne for a friend without feeling like a sitting duck, without crushing my bag under my arm, worried it might be nicked.
Do I miss Dakar at all? At present, no. There are aspects I expected to miss: the goat that lived on the roof next door, waking up to birds chirping, the herd of longhorn steer that ambled up and down Alice’s street, hearing prayers coming from the Sacre-Coeur mosque at night. But I don’t miss any of that, not yet anyways. I feel a bit as though Dakar never happened. I’m almost ashamed by how much I like feeling like it never happened. And when I’m confronted with the fact that it did happen, I feel as though regardless, it didn’t matter. I have some stories now with some shock-value, but that’s about all. And yes, I know this is too simplistic and that Dakar has changed me and that I’ll discover just how much as time wears on, but for now it seems as though I haven’t changed and I’m happy pretending that’s true.
Yes, I suppose I still have some obvious vestiges of Senegal with me still. I have a lingering upset stomach and a cockroach that was unpacked with my luggage and a saran wrapped backpack, one last Leopold Sedar Senghor Airport scam. Funny, that I avoided being scammed at the airport in January when I arrived (Andrea rescued my bags from an overeager baggage attendant with an eye on our dollars), but had to shell out my last CFA on the way out. It seems symbolic, evidence that after four months in Dakar, I was just as much a tourist to take advantage of as I had been when I arrived. Jërëjëf, Dakar, for making that so blatantly obvious. I’ve never been one for subtlety myself.
