Boat Ride

On our first weekend back, we ran into some friends (we have, like, six friends in Dakar. Here were two of them at the same beach as us!) They were en route to N'gor Island and did we want to come? So, sure we did and how fun and here's the pirogue and everyone get in okay buy the tickets that'll be 50 cents each wahoo! And so there are about ten of us on shore when the boat pulls up, but within 20 seconds about fifty people show up from nowhere and this boat is loaded down! And here we are on the boat with a baby (and our friends have a baby, too).

You can sort of see how crowded it is here, but not really. Not like it was. It was crowded!!! We did all have oversized lifejackets with mostly broken ties, though.



Thing is, it's only about a 1/4-mile ride (about 2 minutes) and heck you could easily swim that far even with a baby, right? Well well well, but when a boat sinks, people who can swim perfectly well are often drowned by the flailing arms and legs of those who cannot swim and who, in their panic, try to crawl up on top of other people in some sort of primal effort to stay afloat or get to the highest point. People have literally drowned their rescuers this way. My plan, if I'd ever found myself in a sinking boat, has always been to swim underwater for as long as I can until I rose for air in a safe place, alone. (This sounds horribly unheroic, I know. So judge me.)

But now there's the baby. How would I save her? I had no idea, but you can bet your boots I racked my brain about it the whole way there. Best I could come up with was that I drown myself and Eric uses my dead floating body as a raft to lead our child to safety.

Once we got there, it was very fun. Here's the mamas and the girls; my friend's daughter is 1 and is just an impossibly sweet little girl. Dessi thinks so, too. She just loves her!