Last Post From Dakar

So, as has been mentioned, my stay here has really come to its end. My flight leaves tonight, and I should arrive back in the US on tomorrow evening (fingers crossed!).

The past few weeks have been a really nice send-off. I finished up my time at APECSY last week, and celebrated my birthday with friends with a picnic at Îles des Madeleines last weekend.

Left to right: Me, Claire, the ferryman, Jillian, and Bennett. Photo by Brenda.

This week I had my final classes and presentations for MSID. I've said so many goodbyes already, and it's terribly bittersweet. I prefer "ba beneen yoon" (until next time) and "au revoir" (goodbye, but more literally, to meet again) to anything more final, because I know I will be back.

I remember coming here and having trouble believing I could ever feel at home here. Yet today, I went to the market in HLM for souvenir shopping (a lot of cloth, candy, and tea), and began walking away in search of a set of tea glasses. I was walking in the direction of Mermoz, where I live, and decided I would take a taxi when I got tired or lost. As it was, I made it all the way back - this after I got lost in my own neighborhood the first week! It felt like a real accomplishment.

I shared my last plate of ceebu-jën with my host family this afternoon, though we still have dinner to look forward to tonight. I'll be doing a little more shopping and hanging around, and trying to let the knowledge that I'm leaving in under eight hours set in. It still hasn't.

What I've Learned

Today is two weeks to the day until I leave. It's a little over a week until my 21st birthday, which I suppose is a day that might merit its own post. I thought I'd talk a little bit about what I've learned here.

Sit down - there's plenty of hammocks to go around!

I've been more or less composing this piece in my head for months now. A clever sort of summary of how I've spent my time here, of wisdom I might impart to myself a year ago or someone else considering studying abroad in Senegal who could use the advice - or even for those of you who will never see Senegal, whose most personal experience with the country has been reading my haphazard posts about it these last seven months. So here's another quick list of odds and ends I've picked up this year:

• I've learned a new kind of table manners, which really aren't table manners at all but bowl manners. There's a clumsy way of eating rice with your hands and a polite way, and I think I've gotten a handle on the polite way. I say I think, because really I've also learned that sometimes you can spend a very long time being what Dave Barry calls an "American water-buffalo" without realizing it. At least I only slipped up and put my left hand in the communal bowl once.

• I've learned how to interpret and navigate a lot of social customs and patterns that I was previously unfamiliar with. Greetings, for instance, are a lot slower here and more important. While I still smetimes get frustrated with how long they can drag on, I wonder if I'll feel at all cut off when I go home and experience the shorter American greetings again. As far as other languages differences go, some kinds of offers and requests are meant as jokes (like asking for my hand in marriage at first meeting) or a sign of unending hospitality (like encouraging me to eat until I thought I would explode). At first it was a little hard to tell which is which, but I think I've gotten the knack of it.

• I've learned how many other, smaller things are local customs, rather than just universal behavior. For instance, during my summer working the register at Pekara, I was taught that it was my responsibility as the cashier to always have correct change on hand and in the register. I assumed that held true everywhere, but did not account for a place where much less money passes through most businesses each day. Here, exact change is the responsibility of the customer, not the seller, and some shopkeepers here can be downright rude if you try to pay in big bills (about the equivalent of $10 or $20 bills). In one case, I visited three different stores in an effort to break a 5000 CFA ($10) and ended up in a pharmacy buying a small box of painkillers I didn't really need just because I needed change for the bus. I can't imagine the look I would get if I ever just asked for change from the register without buying anything.

• I've learned how to efficiently haggle for a taxi, and a lot more about navigating Dakar's public transportation network - so much so that I have a separate post about that that I'll post tomorrow or the day after. Haggling in general is an interesting approach to buying and selling that I'll miss in some ways - though in others I'll be glad to get back to just hearing a price and knowing it means something other than "I think this is the most I can get you to pay for this."

• I've learned some more overarching lessons as well. I've gotten a little better about not panicking in strange and unfamiliar situations, and much better at saying "buzz off" to people who I get a bad feeling from. I've learned that even life in a big, exciting city is not enough to change my love of afternoons staying indoors with a good book. I've learned that I think I'd like to do something different with my life than what I thought when I first came here.

If I've learned so much from just the past short months in Senegal, I can't imagine what a lifetime of travel to other interesting places can do to a person. I certainly hope to find out!

Personal Reflections

NOTE: I wrote the original version of this essay for a class assignment, but I thought I'd also post it here, as it discusses a few of the more difficult aspects of my stay that I haven't discussed on this blog. I always want to keep this space "pleasant" and not fall into the trap of ranting or oversharing. I felt this essay struck a difficult balance between that, and telling the truth.

I got a call last Monday from my friend Samba, the man whose job it had been to help me acclimate to life in Soussane. I had been expecting him to call sometime in the last few weeks, but I didn’t have the courage to call him myself. He started the call with the words I wanted to hear the least, but that I knew were true. “You’ve failed us, Lalla,” he said, addressing me by the Senegalese name I had gone by in Soussane. “You have not come back.” When I left Soussane, I had said I would return, though the truth was I didn’t want to, and because I don’t have a car I knew it wouldn’t be likely. I told him this, and he didn’t seem surprised. He had always seemed a little dismissive of my involvement with the village and Senegal. “I don’t think you will ever be a farmer, Lalla,” he had said one day as we were hoeing onions. “You’re a city person.” I proved him right within a week of this, deciding to leave when I realized how futile my time there was.

To start at the beginning, I was assigned to the village of Soussane for my internship this semester by Agrecol Afrique, whose offices I worked at last semester. In retrospect, it’s very clear that I was almost totally unprepared for a three-month stay in the village. . I hadn’t lived in a house without wifi in years, and no electricity was way more of a transition than I thought it would be. It was more than a little frustrating to have spent over a year learning Wolof and find it totally useless in the very situation I had planned to use it most. My research was not in place enough for me to start conducting interviews or doing any kind of fieldwork. I felt adrift, and what’s more useless. Any work I could do in the village felt like an indulgence, as though people were showing me how to clumsily do something for a few months that they themselves had been doing expertly for years, and would continue to do for years after I had left.

Despite all this, I still liked Soussane. My host family and the rest of the village were kind and welcoming to me. While some of the food was a very stark reminder of the kind of poverty most of the village lived in (I’d never eaten sandwiches with spaghetti before), I also found I really enjoy millet couscous with all the various sauces it was served with. It was quiet and peaceful – the entire pastoral ideal was always at the front of my mind there. I saw so many stars and the most beautiful sunsets, and the background noise of the cows and goats was much sweeter than the traffic of Dakar.

Still, I cried almost every day I was there. Most of it was over little things. I cried because I missed my home, because there was trash blowing around the village and rotting just outside its fences, because one of the family members had a chronic illness that didn’t appear to be getting better, because I wished I were a dentist because no one there had decent teeth. I cried because I thought of what they would do with a fraction of the wealth I’m used to seeing people blow away – that I’m used to blowing away. I cried because I hated that I felt sorry for them, when I had no right – when the little girls work harder than I ever have a day in my life, and will until they’re bent old grannies. They shouldn’t have to. They’re amazingly strong. I cried because I realized that I was not needed, and that I had been foolish to come here.

I have decided over the course of this semester that development work, at least in the vein I have been pursuing it, is not for me. Rather than serving a term in the Peace Corps after graduation, I think I am going to apply for a master's program in library science. I would like to specialize in knowledge management (something I learned about at Agrecol, and which I found very interesting), and I wouldn’t mind one day returning to NGO work as a knowledge specialist. But note that: specialist. I am not coming back to work in the developing world until I know I can bring a useful skill set to it. I have learned the hard way that that does not do much good for anyone.

I regret a lot of things about how I have spent my year here in Senegal. If I could do it all over again, I would have spent my first semester internship in the village, when I was less pressured to get work on my research project done, and my second semester in Dakar or Thiès. Perhaps I would have been happier that way, and maybe I would still be on the development path if that had come to be. But I like to think I have returned to a truer path here. I am grateful to the MSID program and to everyone else who has helped me along my way here. Samba and the Diones, my host family in Soussane, are among those who I am not sure if I will ever be able to repay. I did not want to come here and be a silly American, taking experiences as if they were photographs and discarding people I meet like business cards, but I have. Monetarily my debts are settled, of course. But it will be a long time before I will feel they are met morally.