Sao

Unnamed or fictional setting in There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness; pinned at a inferred location within Senegal.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness	Carlo Rovelli	turning point	Rovelli, staying at the Institute of Mathematics in Mbour in January, picks Sao off the map for its name and travels there by taxi, bus and Barri’s battered Peugeot.

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness — Carlo Rovelli (2018)

Source: There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · Readwise highlight

And then we arrive in Sao. A Sao that turns out to be completely unlike the one I was expecting.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: Rovelli, staying at the Institute of Mathematics in Mbour in January, picks Sao off the map for its name and travels there by taxi, bus and Barri’s battered Peugeot. He finds a scattered village of huts among baobabs where children crowd round, women pound millet, and the school head talks about his teaching and receives a donation in euros. Barri then drives him north along a dirt track to Route Nationale 2.
• Why it matters: It is the first stop of the ‘real Africa’ day trip whose later mosque scene in Mbour yields the title line; the village overturns his expectation of a dirty teeming settlement.
• Real vs. fictional: Real village, identified by inference.
• Where is it?: ⚠️ inferred. Clues in the text: “I’m aiming for the village of Sandiara, twenty kilometres inland.”; “then return to the road and find a bus that takes me to the next village, Tiadiay.”; “I chose Sao for its name, because I liked the sound of it. I saw it on the map. It was away from the major roads, but not too far away.”; “After covering a few kilometres, he slows down, pulls over and tells me that we have to take a barely visible track in the sand, to our left.”. Reference works: GeoNames has several: Sao 2246203 (15.0128,-16.9856, Thiès, far north, beyond RN2 and near Tivaouane/Mekhe side, inconsistent with ‘drive north up to RN2’); Sao 2246206 (13.5833,-14.3667, Tambacounda, far east, no); Saw 2246205 (14.4839,-16.6658, Thiès) matches OSM village node 8984040878 ‘Sao, Communauté rurale de Ndiaganiao, Département de M’bour’ at 14.4850,-16.6658. That is east of Sandiara (14.4358,-16.7929), inland from Mbour, a few km off the Tiadiaye road, south of RN2 at Thiès/Khombole (14.76), so a northward dirt track to RN2 fits. Chosen: Senegal. Mbour, Sandiara, Tiadiaye, then a few km along a sand track to Sao, then north to RN2 then Khombole: only the Ndiaganiao Sao fits all of these, and it is in the Mbour department. Alternatives: GeoNames Sao 2246203 (north Thiès, 15.01,-16.99); Diak Sao/Diak Saw (15.00,-16.64), near RN2 area but north of it; Sao in Tambacounda (too far)