Senegal Reflections, Half a Year Later

The following writings restate verbatim my responses to a mid-year survey about the study abroad program through which I went to Senegal in late December of 2008 and stayed through early January of 2009 (What a fun way to welcome in the New Year, hours ahead of everyone back home, especially with the refreshing, warm climate! -- though actually I was recuperating from a strange ailment while all the other students were celebrating the holiday, an ailment which our professor paranoidally feared signaled cerebral malaria) to study ecovillages, microcredit, and sustainable international development. I had a partly-awkward experience because of several holes in the structure of the course and activities, but overall, I had a great time and had a very valuable, memorable, enriching experience. I wrote about it while I was there, occasionally spoke of it or reflected on it in the intervening months, and now it seems I should get to writing about it again. So much came to my attention in the three weeks I spent there in West Africa that I can't possibly have done justice to it in my record of events. At last, I have a beginning to more reflection, tempered and distanced to a much better degree than it could have been while I was mired in the immediacy of it all:

9. What do you feel you got out of your experience? How have your thoughts about this evolved in the past six months?

Well, I got to experience a predominantly Muslim country, keeping what's left of three semesters of Arabic training from slipping away.

I got to see how inefficient micro-lending practices can be around the world and got to think up other ways of running things. From something Marian said to me about international sustainable development, I started thinking a lot about the pitfalls of both facilitating sustainable development, presumptively, at a distance, without concern for the villagers' needs, as well as of complete villager-only participation (which falls into the trap of "tyranny of the majority," and which I actually experienced, to my dismay, on my village visits, having been told I would have something to contribute; it taught me a lot about humility and about accepting being irrelevant to a process, the results of which in the future won't exactly affect me anyway).

I also learned a bit of French, a bit about Senegalese history and politics, and experienced first-hand a world in which feminism, as we think of it in the West, has had little influence (though women are always lauded as the hardest workers, this also means that the men give themselves an excuse to do less and lump more work on the women). I was able to examine a lot of the assumptions about mandatory schooling, and I constantly witnessed misconceptions of the United States. Dining was completely different, albeit exciting, as was navigating the various bathroom facilities. I think I could go on for a while, but the point is I gained a great deal of insight and unique experiences from the course abroad.

My thinking about all this evolved from utter disillusionment, homesickness and then joy to be back in the States, and disappointment with the organization of the course, content, and student interactions, to acceptance of what actually happened during the course (as contrasted with what I'd expected to happen, though that itself was fuzzy) and an appreciation overall for the experience I gained in Senegal. It re-invigorated my motivation to completely invalidate the typical world-changing processes (ineffective and belligerent activism, an environment-only focus strangely dismissive of humans in complicated situations, unacknowledged and faulty assumptions) by different means (focusing on tribes--extant, re-emerging, and emerging--, the science and anthropology of what has actually been sustainable behavior through time, political ecology, social justice, un-oppressive education and a change of vision, and a saner way of raising children and a saner way of living in general).

I also went and read Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter because I was curious about literature from Senegal accessible in English and about what her take on the woman's role in Senegalese society would be (I was not at all disappointed by this wonderful book - many recommendations for this to be used in the course, for the Senegalese and the Americans to discuss together, beyond making posters of cultural stereotypes).

10. Looking back now, what do you feel are important things to share with prospective/current students on this program?

"You will get much more out of this particular program if you expect it to be more of an anthropology course about experiencing the day-to-day differences in a culture partially different from our own. Ecovillages in Senegal pretty much mean 'traditional villages' and even 'suburbs that just twenty years ago used to be villages,' with a small handful of people trying to balance the lust for development, in the style of the highly-industrialized countries, with environmental concerns. As for micro-lending, you will only be disappointed by how the process actually only seems to award one project at a time and leave other important projects in the dust, or, at best, incomplete. This disappointment means you will be doubly disappointed by how it feels that all your work in meetings and on loan applications is completely useless and pointless, especially when the Senegalese students insist on doing almost everything without you. You will not have a real say in the meetings, you will not be able to communicate your suggestions about environmental consciousness such that it at all affects the project to which the loan application applies, and you will not be allowed to defend the loan to a committee because you speak English in a French-speaking country, though you will at least learn what the lines on the loan application ask for."

11. What three issues are most important in your life right now?

1. Creating a healthy living situation
2. Living simply
3. Gaining skills/knowledge

I would have chosen such different responses if they didn't limit the choices to a pre-programmed list!

16. Please comment on how you think we could make this survey better.

As I think I said when I completed the survey before the course (did not have a chance to complete it immediately after the course, in the bustle of leaving and upon returning to the states, diving into Spring semester classes right away), the bubble portion asks really stilted questions, to which, knowing the "agree" or "disagree" or "neutral" answer alone can't possibly explain what the person taking the survey is thinking and might be more effective if room for explanation was offered for some of the more conflicted questions. For me, I get really hung up on the questions that feel like they're coming from an unrealistic, utopia-centric mindset, such as "making the world a better place," which is a very poorly defined concept that denies how humans lived without difficulty for millions of years before the Agricultural Revolution catastrophe, and which sounds like it assumes that such a better place involves the complete lack of violence or change, which, as I said, is unrealistic, and rather silly/laughable. Likewise, questions referring to "nature," a "sustainable world," "foreign" and "exotic," etc. really get under my skin, and I tend to forfeit them as "don't agree or disagree" because the words (themselves implicated notions) get in the way of answering what the writer of the question likely intended. What is meant by sustainability? Why doesn't nature included people (I mean, yes, I'm concerned about ecosystem and habitat destruction, but I am also concerned about the destruction of healthy societal organizations and human relationships that accompanies such destruction - looking at nature holistically). Those kinds of things...I apologize if that's much too analytical and negative; those things just make me feel really queasy about the survey, making me want to know how it's used, why, etc..