Cow herders and my moped

Basically I just wanted to annoy Shawn and put an animal in the title of this story. I go to the post yesterday afternoon, in the middle of fussing around in the kitchen and pick up a box of our junk mail (primarily) that is sent from the work address in DC. I take the back road, which is a highway that runs parallel to the main road to our house, but the main road is almost always jammed with horse carts, taxis and bicycles. I take the back route and go to the post. This back road eliminates the sound of people yelling 'toubab' at me on the main street, not that that term doesn't bring warm fuzzy feelings to me every time I hear it... Anyway, the aim was to pop over to the post, pick up my package and head home. I took the back roads to be quick and be relatively unnoticed. The last part panned out okay. And I am going down a hill after finishing at the post before the final hill up towards our neighborhood on this highway and the moped engine just stops. Now I'm going down hill and it's moving and I'm trying to pedal to see if I can get the litle bugger to start again but it won't. I inch up a little up the hill (as far as I can make it) and there we be. Me and my moped. Stalled, won't start. I take the spark plug out and give that a whirl--See if it's dirty. It seems kind of dirty but it's pretty hot because I just took it out of the moped engine, and I don't really have anything to wipe it off with... many people will get a leaf or something (which I have been known to do too, but fyi, it's not too effective) to try and clean the spark plug. So I scrape on it with the back of my spark plug tool thingy and put it back in. I pedal like mad trying to get the thing started again, but no, it refuses. So now I'm cursing myself for having taken the back road. There are no moped repair people anywhere. and I'm halfway home... a 20 minute walk, probably 30-40 min pushing the moped up a hill. Hmm... So I walk it a little up the hill to where all these cow herders are hanging out. They sell their cows around here in this little mini-stadium. So I talk to them about watching the moped while I go get the day guard Roger to come back for it. Of course they refuse to speak Wolof, one of the national langugages, because they are Puhls and refuse to be "wolof-ized". Whatever, I'm a toubab, we know you really speak Wolof, just talk to me already. One of them admits to speaking French so we try that route. Finally another guy comes up professing to speak Wolof so I tell him I'm leaving my moped for Roger. He's like, Okay. So I manage to see a taxi actually coming up the road and I flag him, take the taxi home. I tell Roger where the moped is (I feel guilty that I'm not doing this myself but with the doo-dads coming over for dinner in less than 2 hours and I haven't really progressed very far with dinner at this point, it's just not going to happen) and he goes to get it and get it repaired. I need to find out exactly what was wrong with it today. My guess is the spark plug, but thats' because most problems come back to the spark plug. What we call here the bougie (boo-jee). Umm, I don't really have an ending to the story except that I got home and so did the moped.... except a little later. The End.