The year was 1998. August was the usual tropical Dakar, with humid heat and torrential rains and short.
Me and Irene were married there a few months ago and that trip to Senegal was, among other things, a sort of honeymoon.
you started with ideas and set a few things: the flight with Air Afrique (Senegal an airline booking flights on planes that had not), someone who was there at the airport in Dakar, a list of groups and associations to go to find in the suburbs of Dakar and Louga.
Any advice of friends who were there already in Senegal, a place to eat (Le point d'interrogation 2) and a place to stay (Continental Annexe).
It starts with a suitcase full of medicines and the desire for adventure.
With hindsight, the trip was organized badly: too many days (three weeks), in a bad period (August and the rainy season) without having planned exactly what to do and especially how, with a tremendous waste of economic resources (two people for twenty days in the hotel).
But it was one of those experiences that changes your life.
Before that I had never moved from Europe and more precisely, apart from some short visit to Paris, Italy.
And here I am, suddenly thrown into a different world: the beggars in the streets, a suffocating traffic, street vendors trying to sell any merchandise, negotiation with the taxi driver, the flavors are so different and vague memories of childhood in atmospheres Sicily.
Especially the feeling that the revolution a human can defeat hunger and poverty (the pain and suffering) was not just an idea that I unwholesome condemned to a life as a "foreigner" in this world, but a pressing need that we measured with the number of beggars in the street poliomyelitis (polio vaccine was discovered how many years?).
a real possibility that we measured with the number of meetings attended in explaining our ideas.
A "mission" of life that is measured by the number of inquiries, needs, desires that in those meetings took shape.
Since those days have passed more than eleven years.
Dakar is almost unrecognizable from an architectural point of view: new roads, new buildings, many shops, boutiques Western style for the new rich.
miraculously disappeared even beggars.
ideas were systematized and structured (at least in my head), as well as projects.
To find the crowds and enthusiastic about the idea to build a better world together day by day we must leave a lot to Dakar, to go inland, agricultural areas in crisis around Diourbel. The inhabitants of Dakar
are too busy bustle of the dream that, in Europe and the United States, you are breaking blows of the financial crisis: we must look for the 'alien' to find a bank to that effect, but at this point, you can continue to put together and connect the "aliens" in Europe and at home.
too are no longer the same person as those faded photos: I do not know better, certainly less unconscious at the time.
But that feeling of open future of infinite possibilities, then tested the meeting in memory every time I stop in Dakar and stroll through the center of VIIe or sleep in the hotel at the time (now called Blanchot and survived all 'Continental Hotel where he was the' annexe).
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