You can get or do anything you want here in Dakar, as long as you talk to the right people.
For example, I saw a guy selling a few doors on the street the other day. Incredibly useful, right? Where do we buy our doors in the US? Is there a door store? I don’t even know.
Or another example. In big cities in North America, if I didn’t own a car and none of my friends owned one either, and I had to transport a bunch of big plants a half-mile, I would probably have to spend hours lugging them myself.
But in Dakar, it took 2 minutes of negotiation and a buck-fifty worth of CFA to convince a cab driver to jam my house’s full contents of houseplants in his trunk, and trundle down the dirt roads to our friend’s house, where I will leave them for safe-keeping while Nigeria swallows me up once again.