Photos from A Quiet Saturday Morning

On Saturday I intended to take a bit of time to write here, so I took the camera and walked around the Phare snapping a few scenes. It was a quiet day in the city with all of the folks gone to the big gathering of the Tidiane brotherhood in Tivaoune. Jane and Jonathan had headed to a garage sale over at Dakar Academy, so I thought it would be a perfect time to do some leisurely reporting.

I found a dozen or so older talibé "alums" doing laundry and taking showers. This is fairly typical and even more so on a weekend. In fact, I found on the camera just now a series of photos Jane took earlier in the week of guys using the shelter for this wonderful modern convenience: running water.

As I continued my tour of the Phare, Hervé started up the generator. We hadn’t actually used it for quite while. The power cuts in our part of the city have been fairly rare lately and mostly on weekends for short periods of time. But the Gideons were here that day and the person doing a presentation had a PowerPoint on his computer and a projector. They had asked specifically if we had generator backup and were anxious not to be shut down by power company problems.

Prescient.

I kept walking, after assuring Hervé that he had all the settings correct. Like I said, it had been a while.

I continued down to the new apartment job site and found Jean Gomis working on the kitchen counter. It may sound dedicated for him to be here on a Saturday, but we’ve actually gotten behind schedule because of his absences. I was glad to see him here and am growing hopeful that we’ll meet our mid-April deadline.

I also ran into Patricia and little Albert, Hervé’s family. He’s a cute little strong-willed child! Can you tell?

So, I got the photos and headed back up to post them. But, of course, the day rarely goes as you plan! The loud hum of the electric generator suddenly ceased. Hmm… Well, I won’t torture you with a detailed account, but we (Hervé, I and the handyman guard, Kemo) spent the next hour or so puzzling over and eventually fixing the thing. That included cleaning a spark plug, adding oil, replacing the pull cord so we could start up the machine again and adjusting the idle speed by bending a wire linkage. In the end the generator ran great! For an hour. That time, though, it was just out of gas. But, of course, our jerry can was empty. We had used all the gas when the Wheaton guys were here to burn old stumps. So poor Hervé went in a taxi and got more gas and refilled the tank. Happily though, that kept the Gideons going until power came back on later in the afternoon.