Beautiful Feet: Benin: Dakar & Friends: Goree Island and Artist "Village"

Dakar was full of surprises and delights, hence my nickname for it "Delightful Dakar."

As expected I reconnected with Patrick, a colleague who worked at AID Benin for about a month. The delight compounded was meeting his fabulous wife, Audrey and their genius child. I say he's a genius because he absorbs words like a sponge, parroting back piece of our conversations and even anticipating what well say if we repeated ourselves. Amazing.

While in Dakar I also had special visitors. Still on vacation from school Svetlana and Meggy visited me in Dakar. It was such a pleasure having their company. Neither had been in Dakar before so we explored together sometimes with Patrick and Audrey after training and on the weekend.

Here are some pictures from our excursion to the historic Goree Island, an island devoid of motorized vehicles but full of well-preserved relics of slave trade history such as the slave house and fort.

View of Goree as our ferry approaches.
We took a ferry from mainland Dakar to Goree.

Fellow ferry folk.

Another lovely picture approaching dock.

Patrick, Audrey and brilliant boy.
Sveta and Meggy not realizing they're in the photo too.

Real storks next to our restaurant.

Madame Benin posing as a Senegalese woman.

Brilliant boy taking advantage of Meggy's pose.

View of the slave house where slaves
were held before transport to Americas.

Oddly, I was glad to return to the slave house on Goree Island. When I first visited Senegal in 2001 with my mom, we came her. I didn't know much French as the time so we just looked at the building and the "door of mo return" leading out to the sea.
Coming back over 10 years later the experience was so different. We hung around to hear the guide who told us about how the people were grouped by gender and age. It was fascinating when he mentioned ho families were purposefully separated by region so the mom night end up in the US, the daughter in Brazil and the father in the Caribbean. No wonder I find people who look like family members all over the country. There is a colleague of mine here form Haiti who looks more like my brother Emanuel than I do. Uncanny!

The guide also mentioned how many Yoruba people we chosen as slaves because of their genetic capacity for endurance, strength, etc. that made them particularly profitable. My heart ached to be in the place where people endured such conditions and treatment the slaves yet I am thankful for the ache in hopes that it will make me less tolerant to injustice and more creative and persistent in combatting it.