I suppose I’m here, although sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.

Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport in Dakar has cats milling around baggage claim and 150 men loitering outside. Six or seven follow you to your bus, where they try to hoist your luggage onto the roof so they can ask to be tipped in dollars. When you climb inside the bus, they encircle it, knocking on the windows. One forces opens the door and asks for money for coffee. He calls you ‘sister’.

At the hotel it’s 7:00 am and you try to sleep, but you can’t. You want to think about something calming, so you think about friends and home, but now you’re going to cry, so you make yourself promise to discount any thoughts you have before getting some rest because you’ve only gotten three-and-half hours of sleep and that’s what causing the sadness, not any profound discontent with Dakar. You tell yourself you don’t dislike Dakar. Just before drifting off, you realize the people you love give your life meaning. You wonder why you left them.

When you wake up, you go to a house with leather couches and white marble tiles on the floors. Ousmane Sembene lives four doors down. You’re star struck. You’re the only one who knows who he is. You sit on the roof with the other fifteen Americans and listen to a man recite your orientation packet and realize periodically that this man is speaking French. He tells you that you will not experience racism but that people will assume your last name is ‘dollar’ and that you will receive five marriage proposals per day. He tells you not to go anywhere with men you don’t know because however many years ago, a girl was raped. You hope he’s just trying to scare you. You decide, regardless, to never again go anywhere, ever, alone with a man. And to never again go anywhere, ever, alone. You remember you’re going to have to walk forty-five minutes to and from school each day.

You eat Thiéboudienne, mushing the rice into a ball in your right hand and rolling it into your mouth. You expected to love the food. You don’t. You’ll get used to it. You walk to the ocean. You climb out onto the rocks and take pictures of what a girl tells you are hermit crabs and a brown sweatshirt in the water and a man walking his goat on the beach. You wonder why the beachfront mansion doesn’t clean up the trash strewn across the sand beyond its walls. You wonder why the mosque next-door doesn’t either. You don’t think about the people you’ve left on the other side of the Atlantic.

Back at the house, you have a dance party on the roof. You realize you’re having a dance party on the roof of a house in Dakar. You hope you never see the photographic evidence of your dancing. You realize you’re having fun. You take a picture of the gorgeous orange sunset beyond the palm trees and the white, angular buildings across the road. You’re told that the orange is just the light from the airport. You decide it’s pretty anyway.