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..

Keep reading: Senegal Reflections, Half a Year Later...

Theology For Our Time

Here's my hodge podge for April:

Today, I attended a couple of talks by a Sister of Mercy, Kathleen Erikson, who works with immigrants on the border at the Women's Intercultural Center, at the detention center, and in other settings. The Center is in Anthony, New Mexico, which isn't far from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. She gave a talk in the early afternoon entitled, "Voices from the U.S. - Mexico Border," and one in the evening called "No Human Being is Illegal: Spiritual Activism and Immigration."

This past weekend, Horizons of Faith presented four spectacular lectures by Rita Nakashima Brock, a scholar whose work focuses on the destructive nature of the crucifixion obsession to Christianity. Her lectures centered around the idea of paradise, thoroughly informed by the research she and co-writer Rebecca Ann Parker worked on for their forthcoming book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Their 2001 release, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us was a stunning exploration that blended their theology of the cross with their personal histories in connection with violence and suffering. Their cooperative endeavors and presentation style, as well as a handful of others, have already infused academia with new forms of scholarly writing, forms that I believe must become the favored approaches to academic work. An obsession with objectivity neglects the role that personal history plays in the shaping of theories and ideologies.

Throughout the weekend, Rita made mentions of the ev08 (or Envision '08) conference that she's been organizing. Though I'm still trying to figure out the distinctions in the word "evangelical" (How differently fundamentalists use is from the way ELCA Lutherans claim it! For those who don't know, perhaps many, ELCA stands for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America...) and pin down the purview of the Emergent Church movement and it's cross-sections with Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It and The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, and his contingent of Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Diana Butler Bass (her? really?), and others, I think it's really cool that Rita and her people at Faith Voices for the Common Good are working to ensure that the young evangelicals with the left-leaning activist-y political sentiment don't feel silenced. The inroads they're making to connect progressive Christians with these young evangelicals, who in turn, will connect progressive impulses with conservative Christianity, are really fascinating. Keep the youth and their impulses from feeling silenced, and they won't break off into a faction and refuse to dialogue with mainstream Protestants and other progressive Christians. Sounds logical enough, right?

Also this month, I gave my "Images of God" presentation in theology class (we were all assigned this presentation). Everyone else had their paper from which they read, detailing their spiritual histories and responses to the course and the images of God examined so far. I instead went and looked for my own, as I had written plenty in my journals for the class about my spiritual journey so far--about my happenstance introduction to the American Baptist Church (distinct from the Southern Baptists as slightly less virulent conservative theology), the mild exposure throughout my childhood to Russian Orthodox icons brought by various relatives from Saint Petersburg, my break with Christianity as a young adolescent, my dabbling in Buddhism, then atheism, then agnosticism, until my experiences with the earth slowly brought me back to some sense of the "sacred," and brought me to an ecumenical bookstore, where I not only broadened my knowledge of theology but also renewed by faith in Nebraskans as a not entirely closed-minded population.

My images of god presentation (if I had any say in it, we would have been examining images of gods, but that would have only been a subject for a secular school exploring theology and religion)

• showed the feminine face of god,
• spoke to my need for silence, solitude, serenity, and simplicity,
• explored Marian images co-opted by indigenous and marginalized communities (in Japan, Korea, Australia, Indonesia, and the United States, many of which I found at this amazing repository of Marian images), especially the Black Madonna as portrayed by both black and white artists (I even found a remarkable Adam image of a contemporary black youth, holding his iPod, against Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel background),
• discussed the concept of hospitality and openness through an attitude of welcoming all (but I also discussed how viewing God as all-encompassing, of both good and bad, everything, is problematic because of the problem of evil),
• covered dance as a spiritual image and experience, before
• discussing animism in contrast to the debate about dominion versus stewardship, and
• considering earth images, earth-based spirituality, permaculture and the design of welcoming, inviting, spiritually-nourishing spaces (not to mention the appreciation of such spaces that exist without human tampering), community, and images of people embracing the planet-globe.

I covered all of the images most poignant and meaningful to me at this point in my life and detailed why they seemed to fill fill such a void, a void that had been left by Christianity up 'til now.

Keep reading: Theology For Our Time...