Looking up mountains of stairs to a statue of a man and woman holding a child in front of the blue sky. 
Yellow bus surrounded by rubble on the side of the road. Tall statue in the background. 
Stray brown and white dog approaching the camera in a trot on the beach. 
Tree overlooking hills that lead to the urban sprawl along the coast of Dakar. 
People lining both sides of a market street, buying and selling that stretches back into the distance. 
Traditional costume with a mask surrounded by a mane of black feathers. 
Brittle bones of ‘Lucy’ an ancient homosapien on display in the African Heritage museum. 
Statue of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene smoking a pipe in the middle of Chiekh Anta Diop University in Dakar. 
Sunset over the beach on the coast where Dakar meets the Atlantic Ocean.
A series of photos taken in Senegal. Tim Donahue // Wavelength
By: Tim Donahue
January 28, 2023
1.5 hours of sleep would be putting it generously. The past 48 hours have been a montage of blurring airport stops and plane rides, they’re all beginning to blend together. As I put it in a WhatsApp message to my dad, I’m “Feeling: Insane”.
Jan. 28 at 9:00 a.m., I left Seattle and wedged myself between a nuclear family, sporting twin boys with blonde hair and blue eyes, and a twenty-something hairy type who cleared his throat a lot and played WorldStar clips through his phone speakers in lieu of the headphones that I knew he had. He smelled like my grandparents, his single saving grace was that intoxicating pure-Texas perfume of sawdust, tobacco, and gasoline. I knew Dallas was his last stop, I could smell it all over him.
I rejoiced upon the landing of my first plane. The WorldStar guy followed me to a Mexican restaurant but our paths eventually split and I enjoyed my Tex Mex in peace. I had chicken tacos and a beer with a lime in it, I watched college basketball—Arkansas vs. Baylor, I think—and studied the old Spanish art that had been reproduced around the walls. The beer was sweet, American beer is sweeter, more earthy, when you’re leaving at the top of the hour. Dallas to Paris, the longest leg of my trip.
January 29, 2023
My flight from Dallas to Paris was the mixed bag of all mixed bags. The massive plane sprawled seven rows across and was barely inhabited by the time my final group boarded. The man to my right complimented the book I was reading, ‘Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction’ by JD Salinger. We cut through much of the flight’s initial duration with talk of Salinger’s sleekness and readability, though we both agreed that I was reading a minor work compared to ‘Franny and Zooey’. This man was from Illinois, he ordered two gin and tonics, and our conversation passed much like a Salinger novel—I looked up, and hours had passed.
I wrote as the sun fell away from the window seat: Half on a novel I’ve been writing, and half on an essay that would’ve been long since done if not for the book I read. C’est la vie, there’s only twenty-four hours in the day and I lost more whenever we passed another landmark to the East.
The bad part of the mixed bag—the rotten, slimy lettuce that clumps with condensation near an unseen tear in the bag—came when I took my sleeping pill. I was led to believe in the power of that little blue capsule, I was led to venerate and fear its strength; I took it with shaking fingers and lots of water, and I laid awake for the rest of the nine hour flight.
The Paris airport sapped my sense of humor and replaced it with the tremors of a body that is reaching for energy it no longer had. I’d been up for about twenty-two hours by this point. Without a wink of sleep on the longest leg of my trip, I exited the plane and ran face-first into a sign that bore my name ‘Timothy Donahue’.
2:00 a.m. back in the States, and this guy talks fast. He walks faster than he talks, and he sprinted through customs while I wandered like a child on a leash in his wake. ‘L’avion a Madrid’, ‘Un homme a la porte 14’: He translated my poor French into passable French, but he left me in the dust of that Labyrinthian Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport with a rush and a strange sense of passing panic that stuck with me long after I boarded my next flight.
Thankfully, the final two legs of my trip were largely uneventful. One two hour flight to Madrid, lots of waiting and almost sleeping in the Madrid airport, and another three hour flight before landing, finally in Dakar, Senegal.
There was an immediate language barrier upon my arrival, the French was slower than it was in Paris, the attitudes more patient, and yet it was still too much for me to keep up with. I’d never been a minority before, my one experience abroad was in South Africa—which is becoming more and more like London’s Southern cousin in my memory.
Out of the airport and through the sea of drivers soliciting their taxi service, I found my classmates looking happy, hiding their exhaustion better than I, sitting on their luggage as they waited for our bus. I felt my lungs as they stretched and fell into my stomach. I missed my girlfriend, and my mom, every totem pole I hung onto back home, the crisp, cleansing winter air was missing from my throat.
Pam, the first one to arrive out of all my classmates, acted as our unofficial and—considering the fact that she arrived the night before—underqualified tour guide. The bus rumbled and with it sloshed my nervous guts. I had yet to decipher the overhead fan in my seat and, even in the night of winter, the heat was constricting—muggy mid-eighties that stuck in your lungs. I sat, drifting between awakeness and the pseudo-sleep that I’d gotten used to on the plane. All the while Pam pointed out new soccer and basketball stadiums as we passed.
I ate my second dinner of the night when we got to Guest House Yoff around one in the morning. We had chicken and cous-cous with french fries and a salad. I felt as if I had a toe dipped into African cuisine with a foot placed firmly in the french fry world of McDonalds. Neither comfortable nor lucid enough to reject a meal, I stuffed my already plane-food-filled stomach.
Though my nerves were shot in a way that would take days to recover from, I noticed though my fog a goodness to the people around me. We had, and it was apparent immediately, the connective tissue of curiosity. Some oozed enthusiasm, and some like me nodded off as we ate. The air was thick with the aura of our melatonin, but we ate and we smiled with open and gracious mouths. Eager [even to the detriment of at least my stomach] to accept.
January 31, 2023
The next two days were marred by “La Tourista”, a virus that is common among Europeans and Expats in Africa. It turns your insides out and turns you against your stomach. In bed all day, I was at war while my classmates introduced themselves to the rest of the world. I saw the bedroom and the bathroom, too weak for even a stroll around the neighborhood, and much too weak to write in any detail. Let me just say this, it’s gross. I felt like a ghost of myself, like a drunken projection of my solid body had persisted beyond the morning after and into the reality of the rest of my life. For the sake of my stomach and yours, I’ll leave it at that.
February 2, 2023
Reanimated! The fresh breeze feels good outside, and though my face is still hot, I’m back with the group and holding onto just about all of my food. Others are starting to get sick now and while I’m sympathetic, there’s a part of me that’s celebrating the shared aspect of our pain. The seagulls are brown here, they look like hawks. The crows have white bellies, and the lizards go inside.
We listened to a lecture about the Tijaniyya brotherhood of Muslims today. We packed into a conference room in the West African Research Center—or, what seems to be the sanctuary for white people around here—and we listened while a Dr. Marame Seck talked about brotherhood and acceptance within a religion that was a complete abstraction to me just days before.
We had fish and rice for lunch. It felt good to get some real food in my body after filling my sick days with bananas and croissants. Anything to baby the stomach that revolted against me.
My girlfriend made a love potion and put it in an envelope for me to open “when you want to hold my hand”, and I cried when I read the letter that came wrapped around it. Distance makes the world seem bigger, and I’d like it to stay as small as possible from here on out. I’ve been keeping the potion in my pocket everywhere we’ve gone. I rub the wax exterior when I start to feel anxious. I think “the only thing I have to do is exist.” Until we meet again.