Occupy Ave Bourguiba

Every morning, we wake up to Facebook posts, op-eds and articles about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  We have enough internet access to follow along quite well with news from around the world.  We are called to close our bank accounts and open new ones at a local credit union, to support protests in financial districts across the US, and to join forces with our Mock-upy Sesame Street comrades.  (Damn you, 1% of cookie monsters!)

While the global reach of US financial systems cannot be ignored, we, like many educated Americans, do not feel the inequitable disparities on a daily basis.  Or do we?

By pure coincidence, the place where we're staying is a 10 mins walk from our French school.  And, four times per day, we snake through the neighborhood, "Bonjour"-ing our way along streets, alleys and playgrounds.

In the morning, we see butchers setting out their meat for the day and fathers walking their daughters to the "bilingual" school (where most children are actually tri-lingual in French, English, and Wolof).  We see women sweeping the sidewalks with bundles of palm fronds and taxi drivers jockeying for riders.

Stopping for goat meat at the djibiterie

Dad taking daughter to school = excellent.

We also see children, lots of children, sitting on the curb.  While education in Senegal is "free" and "compulsory" for anyone under the age of 16, the public school system doesn't have the capacity to educate all of the children, only about 70%.  And generally, we know where in the global markets those children, especially girls, who don't go to school and who never learn to read or write will end up.  No where.  For those who are able to obtain education (the BAC degree is the high school equivalent), jobs outside the market are few.  Our home is cleaned weekly by a woman with a university degree.

In the afternoon walk home, we see the same butchers, now surrounded by flies after a day in the hot sun, still selling their meat.  Without refrigeration, will they take a financial loss because they bought too much from their supplier?  Or, will they try again tomorrow, cutting away visibly spoiled sections while brushing away the flies?  

Butcher shop operating without refrigeration or water.

Life's a beach.

Through all parts of the city, we see sand, piles and piles of orange-white sand.  This sand, most likely, has been mined illegally, stripped from Dakar's beaches at a rate of more than 400 truckloads a night.  The long term significance is two-fold.  First, sand mining is causing tremendous environmental degradation.  As the coastline is shifting, marine wildlife patterns are likewise changing; shorelines are succumbing to massive erosion.  Second, the reason why sand piles are everywhere is because they're used in basic construction materials.  To save money, people make homemade cinder blocks using part cement, part sand.  As you might expect, these are not nearly as strong or durable as pure cement blocks.  In the short run, this allows for cheaper and faster construction, but as the world saw in Haiti, poorly built structures with compromised materials do not fair well in earthquakes or other natural disasters.  Although Dakar is not on an active fault line (neither is Washington, DC), the potential destruction and loss of human life is great.

The story of Senegal in the context of the global economy is not unlike that of the majority of countries in the developing world -- extreme poverty, high rates of illiteracy and exploitation of natural resources.  Clearly Wall Street, while an ocean away, can be felt on the city streets of Senegal, where the majority of people don't have bank accounts, let alone funds to deposit in them.  They occupy their streets every day with fruit stands, boulangeries, cell phone "credit card" shops and Nescafe kiosks.