Preparing to leave

After to-day I only have 1 more full day in the office in Dakar. Next week I'm going to a workshop in Saly on the Petite Cote, and then I'm back in the office on Monday 10th May and fly out to Rome that evening. So I'm now really busy, firstly preparing for the workshop, but also starting to pack up ready for my departure, slightly complicated by the fact that I have to leave my appartment on Monday, so can't go back there when I return from Saly. Luckily some friends, Lucas and Catherine, have offered to let me stay at their place so I don't need to go looking for a hotel, but it means packing everything up now rather than when I get back which would have been easier.

Now starting to think about what the last year has meant and what will be my abiding memories of Dakar. I'lll try and put some more about this on my next posting (as mentioned - I'm really busy at the moment), but for me some of the keywords for Dakar are: sunshine, rain (in season), music, fitness fanatics, elegant dresses (Bubus) with matching headties, grubby taxis, colourful 'car rapides', sunsets, surf and sand, good food, not so good beer, pollution, power cuts, bustling markets, terrible roads ... in a word - Africa!

Final week in Dakar

As promised in my last blog, here are some pics of my colleagues in the Dakar office. Starting from the left we have Bety Sow Demba, the admin assistant, and then Alpha Bah, the head of the IT unit in the Regional Bureau and then Djamila Diop, the national IT Officer.

I'm now in my final week in Dakar. Next week we have a regional IT workshop in Saly, similar to the workshop we had in October. Following that I am back in the office here for 1 day and then I fly out to Rome for a debriefing session before finally flying back to the UK on 16th May. There's quite a lot to do this week in preparation for the workshop, and in addition of course I have to start packing up and getting ready to go home - time just seesm to be flying by, better get on with it!

Workshop & travelling around with Raksha

Its been a very hectic few weeks. My wife, Raksha, has been visiting and we've had a chance to to do some travelling round Senegal. Our first couple of days were spent in Saly, at then end of the Regional ICT workshop. Saly is a beach resort, much frequented by the French for a bit of winter sunshine. During the workshop we operated a fine system for anyone turning up late for a session - 1000 cfa for each session - at the end of the week we had over 60,000 cfa (Bety was very diligent in collecting he fines!) which we used to buy food and nappies for a local orphanage (see pic left). The workshop itself was a great success. There were representatives from the ICT teams of all 19 countries in the West Africa region (see right), and we packed a lot in, inlcuding workshops on Emergency Preparedness and Response and presentations on WFP ICT strategy from senior management in Rome, as well as my session on Project Management - and some people still found time to explore the bars of Saly at night!


Once the workshop had finished Raksha and I travelled down to Sine Saloum - on the way our taxi broke down in the middle of nowhere and we eneded up spending a couple of hours in a local village while the local 'mechanic' repaired it using his sophisticated welding equipment (see picture).

Sine Saloum is a delta area, with mangrove swamps and lots of birdlife. We stayed in a lovely lodge with huts facing out on to the water, all very peaceful, and very diffrent to Dakar. After Sine we came back to Dakar and Raksha spent some time getting used to the hustle and bustle of Dakar life while I went back to work. Last weekend we spent a couple of days on Ile Goree (see earlier blog) - really nice and relaxing again - and interesting to spend the evening there as mostly people go for a day trip and so it's especially peaceful at night and early morning.

We then travelled to St Louis in the north of Senegal, right on the border with Mauretania. This was the old colonial capital and it still retains many old colonial style buildings, it has a run down feeling, but is gradually being restored to former glories. It's also a busy fishing port, with large fishing boats (pirogues, see picture left) plying too and fro all day long, bringing fish to the very busy, and extremely smelly, fish market on the edge of town.


So it's been a vey busy time and all seems to have gone by in a rush - Raksha goes back to UK tonight and then tomorrow I'm off to Burkina Faso for a few days to look at some of the projects that WFP are running there. Hopefully I will then have some more time to put some more detail and some more pictures, as I now have a working camera - thanks to Raksha!