Yesterday we went back to the Grand Yoff Market to buy fabric for duvet covers. To my uneducated eyes, the market is chaotic, dusty, loud, unorganized, unsophisticated, congested with people, cars, horse carts, livestock, noisy with honking, hawking, amplified prayers, haggling. Stalls after stall after stall, each averaging less than 100 square feet, display every possible kind of merchandise: sneakers, foam rubber pads, hair products, car parts, cigarettes, chickens, cookies, soap powder, cell phones, batteries, fabrics, Barack Obama underwear, Muslim Barbie. Every possible thing you could need is there…except Diet Dr. Pepper.
What’s not visible is the second level of enterprise. In the alleyways, wide enough for two people to pass are shops 10 feet deep on each side. These are sewing factories. The passageway hummed like a hive. The machines were manned, and I intentionally choose to use the word “manned”, by boys and men, whose age ranged from pre-teen (at least based on the absence of facial hair that would be my guess) to 20 or 25. Depending on the level of their skill, they were either piecing together traditional garments for men and women in vivid fabrics or they were performing complicated finishes with trim.
This was my first exposure to any kind of local business enterprise, organized according to the local culture. It reinforced a growing awareness that business transactions are taking place all around me. By the standards of New York or Amsterdam or London, where a decent lunch now costs $10 or 8 Euros, these are micro-transactions…maybe as little as 25 cents or as much as $4. Margins in Senegal are slim. The difference between a good day and a bad day may be the cost of four tomatoes or a six-pack of Coca-Cola or a pack of cigarettes. But everyone is hustling to earn enough to feed their family, pay the rent, send their kids to school, buy the inventory that they will sell the next morning.
I haven’t seen anything that looks like lazy. At the fish market, for example, there are young men who sell heavy-duty plastic bags for transporting multiple purchases weighing as much as 10 or 12 pounds. And then there are boys who carry the bags. Other young men run errands for the men and women who own the stalls. Moms have babies on their backs and toddlers at their feet.
Everyone is ready to work.
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