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.