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!