An organised mess

I woke up on Tuesday morning, ate breakfast and put on the regular working attire, and rushed upstairs for the morning line up. When steeping outside in the smoggy Dakar air for almost the first time, you could feel the pollution and dirt in the air as you took breaths. Something I can’t imagine living or working in every day.

After our line up we where assigned our task for the day ,I was part of the workforce witch on this boat means almost all diffrent types work exempt keeping watch, steering and cooking. For me and the rest of the workforce this meant cleaning the student corridor and bathrooms. Me and two others took on the job of cleaning toilets and showers. The title of this blog has to do with me comparing the city of Dakar to the state of this boat. Although we have lots of protocols and rules that shower was far from clean. After the long and a bit tiring clean it was time for lunch. After witch it was time to get ready for our first expedition of the five day long stay in Dakar. We walk of the ship and follow Erling out of the harbour on to the street outside the port gate. I was met with a busy street crossing filled with fast going cars, people, stands selling “krims krams” and taxi cars that looked like they had not been on an inspection since 2002. The sunny heat set in we hastily jumped in one of the taxi cars, and bargained with the driver about the price. After witch he sped into the busy traffic. The traffic in Dakar is much like the cleaning habits on the boat “ an organised mess” nobody really knows how or why it works, it just does. We sat in the taxi and saw as cars, goats, motorcycles and people kriss cross across the street with almost no consequential thinking. When we arrive at our destination and met up with the others. We where there to visit a callcenter that answers the phone when you call “Väst Trafik”, they answer the phone in Swedish to help people or buss drivers to book, rebook or change route with the busses in the “Gothenburg” area. For this to be possible they obviously need to learn Swedish. Witch they did on the top floor of the building. The school was the main reason we went to visit. It was really god learning experience for both us and them since the language barrier we often faced during our other visits was a lot smaller. They got to do their assignments and we go answers to ours. After our pretty short visit to the school on the top floor. We got to se when people answered calls in the actual call-centre, they spoke Swedish very well. Then it was time to go back to the boat again, this time me and three others took the wrong taxi, our driver took the most downtown route in the middle of rush hour, so wee got stuck in traffic for two hours in the African heat …… never again.

Emma-Karin