Tours of Ouakam Plage With Frederique 1

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The International School of Dakar is located on the western side of the Cap Vert Peninsula, in the neighborhood of Fenetre Mermoz, several miles north of central Dakar. The peninsula is generally volcanic, and the western shore is dotted with beaches tucked between rocky outcrops.

See Orientation for google earth satellite images.

Immediately north of the school is the Lebou fishing village of Ouakam, one of the most picturesque spots anywhere, with its large white mosque on the shore set against the dark volcanic bluffs of the Mamelles. It's a easy 15 minute stroll from ISD to Ouakam, up the Corniche, the main north-south artery linking Almadies-NGor-Yoff in the north to the Plateau and downtown Dakar.

But what do they know of us, and what do we know of them? Not much.

I've been diving regularly out of Ouakam, and have now made some pretty good connections there, as previously described. Wanting to introduce life at the plage to my 6th graders, I arranged a visit with Frederique late last week, the aim being severalfold: to visit the fresh fish/live lobster processing facility; to introduce students to the potentially important archaeological site down near the beach; and to visit and collect water samples from the community well, as a springboard for discussing water quality testing, monitoring, and water treatment.

Students visited by homeroom last Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. See Ouakam2 for video clips of these two visits.

Photos (top to bottom): photo1: drawing water from the community well; photo2: runoff from the community of Ouakam flows directly, untreated, through this pipe to the sea, the groundwater of which is the source of the community well; photo3: our new student from Cameroon, Ekwopi, wanders through the very lush oasis of vegetation fed by the water runoff; photo 4: ceramic and shell material in situ along the beach, likely hundreds of years old, left by the ancestors of the Lebou, thus of potential relevance and importance; photo5: shark heads (hammerheads) on the beach (a topic to be covered upcoming), fascinating for the kids, tragic for the local ecology; photo6: shark head (unidentified species), the rest harvested for the meat, dorsal fin (for shark fin soup), and liver (used locally as a medicine); photo7: another shark head, I suspect of a black tip, reportedly about two meters long, again the meat had been harvested; photo8: a large crab.