“You know, guys… we’re halfway done.”

On Friday, I’ll have been in Senegal for two months. Two months from today, I’m flying out of the Dakar airport. I figure, then, that this is a good time for a midpoint check-in, of sorts. Have my perceptions of this place changed? Have I changed? Apart from all of these little individual interesting, shocking, irritating, or fun snapshots I’ve been giving you, what is my life like here?
Well, I go to school. This may be news to you, dear readers, since, out of consideration for your reading pleasure, I haven’t devoted much space to that block of my life. Monday through Thursday, I’m on the Suffolk University Dakar campus from either 9:00 a.m. or 11:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. I’m learning French and Wolof, and about crisis management and Islam and Sengalese culture. It’s not much work, usually (mashalab – I really don’t want to attract any malignant jines to mess that up). Sure, I spend time in the breaks between classes and when I get back to my house doing readings and papers, but I’m still working towards feeling like it’s okay to not be constantly doing work. Sure, I’m participating in a choir and a lecture group and the language partnership club (and writing this blog, which, I’ll have you know, takes me at least a little time, in case you couldn’t gather that from my tendencies towards excessively long posts), but without all of my cherished, whirlwind organizations and activities at Georgetown, I actually do have occasional time to do extra stuff like keep up to date on Senegalese politics, go on runs, read the Coran in French (I know, I know… but the Arabic-phonetic Arabic-French book was just so pretty), and explore beaches, churches, bars and nightclubs. I feel like I have a reasonable mental map of about a quarter of Dakar: I know how to get from Mermoz to les Almadies, Ouakam, Amitié 3 and downtown. I know where to catch a car rapide, and how to get off of one. I talk to the same fruit vendor and phone card salesman every day on the way to or from school. I feel like I know what I’m doing, not all the time, but much of the time.
Still, though, exploring isn’t quite the same. Here’s the thing: I thought, in the romantic corner of my mind (okay, maybe it’s a little bit more than a corner) that I would love Dakar. I came to Washington, DC in August 2008, having never lived anywhere but Ann Arbor, MI. I adore Ann Arbor. And now I adore DC. I enjoy both places immensely, certainly in large part because of the people I know and the experiences I’ve had there, but also because of the physical qualities of the places themselves. I like strolling around downtown Ann Arbor, or through Georgetown or Adams Morgan or Dupont Circle, even by myself and without particular direction. Here, no one ever strolls. I wouldn’t walk around outside unless I was going someplace. It’s simply not pleasant: the dust from the partially or unpaved roads blowing up into your face around buildings so cracked and peeling that it looks like a mild tornado just came through, the trash and mud smeared across the street, the cars gasping exhaust into the claustrophobic heat and humidity as they whip within inches of your legs, the men hissing at you or yelling at you about how attractive their merchandise is or how attractive you are. And of every part of my mid-point assessment, this is the bit about which I feel the worst. I took DC into my heart – I expected to be able to do the same with Dakar. I have friends who have gone or are now abroad who say that they feel such a connection to Paris, to Berlin, to Rome, and they seem so awesome and culturally competent. I spent all summer having self-important fantasies about how classy, exotic, and Global Citizen-esque it would sound to be able to say “oh yes, I adore Dakar – it’s one of my favorite cities in the world – it’s my home.” And I don’t know if I’m simply being an insensitive westerner, incapable of appreciating something outside of my comfort zone, or if it objectively is less enjoyable to be on the streets in metropolitan Senegal than it is to be in the cleaner walkways of cities I know, cities filled with people who treat me with respect or at least ignore me, cities with the finances to construct buildings with at least a secondary aim of being aesthetically appealing, cities where I can feel safe walking around by myself even in areas I don’t know perfectly or as the sun is setting or while wearing shorts.
Don’t get me wrong: Dakar is not a cesspit of refuse and thieves. It’s just not an easy place to live. And that’s not an easy thing for me to say, because that’s not how I had planned to feel, at this point in my stay here.
I feel obligated, now, to say a few more positive things. Because, really, I’m having an excellent time. There are some places here that are quite lovely, like my running route on the Corniche past the huge mosque and the bright ocean, the little ice cream shop downtown, the flowered walkways on the Ile de N’gor which I visited this weekend, the bar a friend found lit in colors and serving possibly the best fruit juice combinations I’ve ever had. But, more than that, there are lots of lovely people. Everyone is quick to cite “terenga” – hospitality – and they practice it well, with physical amenities but also with friendly greetings and inclusiveness. There’s such a sharp contrast: it’s become my rule of thumb that anyone who approaches me on the street is going to fall somewhere on the spectrum from irritating to threatening, but anyone I approach is going to help me with anything I need at the smallest question and smile as they do so. Multiple vendors or boutique owners have told me to ignore the extra 50 francs when I don’t have exact change. I walk around and smell cooking ceebu jen and ocean over the periodic leavings of the horses that clatter through pulling carts. Sure, the list of sounds I don’t like is long (and mostly consists of different variations of the afore-mentioned male-generated commentary with a dash of taxi horns) but in general the sound here is wonderful. I sit on my rooftop cocooned in the slightly distorted chanting from the mosque loudspeaker. At night, groups of baifals, men from a Mouride sect that values physical labor and for some reason also seems to be associated with dreadlocks and pot smoking (which, on a side note, is highly illegal here – as in, there’s a mandatory three year prison sentence for being caught holding marijuana) fill the streets with a cadence that’s half song and half shout. I found the songs exciting from the start, but now they feel comforting, too. The “Allahou akbar” twists snugly through my day, brings a faint smile to my lips when I notice it, which, sometimes, I don’t consciously at all. Even some of the most initially strange things have sunk into the rhythm of normalcy. Sure, the trappings of my life are fairly different here from how they are at home, but most of the time nowadays my thoughts are occupied with normal things: When is this class over? How does my hair look? What are we having for dinner? Why am I chronically incapable of setting aside enough weekly hours for sleep? I’m still aware that the streets, the restrooms, and the modes of speaking are different from what I experience as normal, but I’ve been spending progressively less of my active thought on that fact. Rather than taking a shower and pondering the water pressure and the awkward proximity of the toilet, I’m thinking about my plans for the weekend or how soon I’ll need to buy more soap.
So, have I changed, then, in two months? Well: I’m awesome at pealing mangoes with a swiss army knife and extracting mostly bone-free morsels from whole fish using baguette as my only utensil. I now distinguish between the different dishes we eat, rather than mentally responding to the dinner question with oh look, more rice and unidentified mushy stuff. I actually am not sure if the days really are getting a bit cooler, because I’ve totally reversed my expectations about temperature: rather than assuming that in the normal state of the world I will not be sweaty and gross and noticing when I am, I now barely think about being too hot or thirsty but rather notice the times when I’m not. I can sometimes navigate the choose-your-own-adventure novel of Wolof greetings: I can pick one of about fifteen different ways to ask how you are, and, depending which I say, you can choose from a different set of options including telling me that you exist, that you are in peace, that you thank God, that you are on top of it, that things are going, that you’re actually not doing well at all (wouldn’t want to attract those malignant jines), that in fact I’m what’s new in your life. And then, depending what you said, I have a whole other set of options…
Unfortunately, though, my progress in Wolof faces a serious three-pronged motivation threat: I’m better at French and thus speaking French is easier, I indeed have serious doubts that even with very hard work in my twice-weekly class I would by the end of the semester be able to hold an actual conversation in Wolof that could effectively serve any purpose other than demonstrating that I can cobble together some basic sentences in Wolof, and I quite frankly care more about becoming fluent in French than becoming semi-passable at a language that I will have no opportunity to speak anywhere but in a small swath of West Africa. Which is not to say that I’m doing badly in Wolof class. I can regurgitate lists of vocabulary words onto the best of vocab exams. And, you know, I can have a really stimulating conversation in which I list vocab words. My French, however, is definitely improving from having five classes in the language and using it to communicate with every person I know except my fellow CIEE students, though I think the perceived improvement is even greater because I quickly threw my previously fairly high self-consciousness about speaking to the winds. I am going to make grammatical mistakes and have an accent, and that’s just okay. Better that than not talk, and everyone except my French professor is very forgiving. My comprehension was always better than my speaking, but I can now understand essentially all of a scholarly article without a dictionary and take notes in French on lectures in French that are later comprehensible enough to study for a test. I can’t skim nearly as effectively as I can in English, and if I zone out of a lecture it takes me longer to catch back onto the thread of what the professor’s saying than it does in my native tongue (not, of course, that this is ever a problem, since I am always a model of alert concentration in class). I can have conversations about someone’s day or family life or about menu selections and later only extrapolate what language I must have been speaking from context – that’s pretty cool, even if when we start to discuss more complex or abstract topics my French abilities start to be a minor barrier to my ability to sound like an interesting or intelligent or nuanced person.
So, I’m not sure what opinion my host family has of my intellect. I’ll admit to still worrying about their opinion of me in general – every time my yaay tells me “tu es très gentile,” I can’t help but think no, I’m actually not that nice at all – I just really, really want you to like me. They’ve started letting me occasionally help with things, which may either mean that I’m integrating or they’ve decided I’m not worth pampering. I feel like I’m getting to know them better, getting to feel much more comfortable in the house. I have routines of interaction with everyone: my yaay puts way more powdered milk than I want in my tea while teaching me Wolof phrases, my baay says “a demain” to me every time I scoop up my homework to go upstairs, Papis occasionally gives me ataya, Aziz sings American hip hop to me and teases me to dance, Sokhna and I sneak up to the roof to check her facebook undercover from the adults who are convinced she can’t use a computer and in fact should be cooking. I’m starting to be able to tease personality traits apart from cultural mannerisms, even if I do still have to constantly remind myself that they are not the prototype of all Senegalese families. I also got to learn more about the actual composition of my family recently, when I asked Aziz to draw me a family tree to help me with the family words unit in Wolof class. You’ll recall that man who has the bedroom next to mine of whose identity I spent nearly two months in utter ignorance. Turns out he’s my brother. And it turns out Aziz isn’t. He didn’t even draw himself onto the family tree, and so I asked him where he was on it. “Here,” he said – he’s the son of one of my yaay’s nine brothers. “But they gave me to Fanar when I was a baby.” Fanar is my yaay’s oldest daughter, the one who lives elsewhere in Dakar with her husband. When I asked why that had happened, he replied, “because it was Fanar who wanted me.” I didn’t push it, even though I had no idea why, if he belonged to Fanar, he would be living with us rather than with her, not to mention why he would be transferring families as a baby at all – because, of course, I also had no clue if it was a sensitive topic. According to my Wolof teacher (this question saved us a full fifteen minutes of class time), however, this is common enough, a form of honoring one’s relatives and making members of the extended family happy.
So, I guess we can add this to the list of cultural things about which I’m now slightly more informed, along with greeting etiquette, eating tactics, the dialogue of street commerce, the positions and roles people typically assume.
I think I’m becoming a lot more culturally competent, as the program aims to help me do, but I’m also starting to feel the unsatisfying tingle of cognitive dissonance. After a certain point, objective values and moral subjectivity only mix so well in my head. This may be because they are, in fact, opposites. I should probably explain, though, before I start to rant. Last Thursday, in Société et Culture Sénégaleses class, we had a panel of gays and lesbians talk to us about LGBTQ issues in Senegal. This is the kind of thing we do often in that class; each week is a different topic, from public health to Islam to art to gender, and we have at least one guest speaker to talk about that area as it relates to society and culture here. My overwhelming emotion emerging from Thursday’s class was sadness: without exception, the young adults on the panel talked about how they were ridiculed, threatened and rejected because of their sexuality. In Senegal “acts against nature” are a legally punishable offense, and there are regularly incidents of violence against people thought to be homosexual. Some people claim that if you physically touch a homosexual person your prayers will be unheard by God for forty days. I could talk about my thoughts on these issues for some time – but that’s not why I brought it up. It was only after the sick unhappiness had faded a bit from my stomach that I began to think about the fact that the class had been very obviously biased in one political/moral direction. The material had been presented to us through the lens of homosexuality-is-an-okay-lifestyle-choice-and-should-not-be-met-with-discrimination-of-any-kind. I happen to agree with this stance completely, and that’s why it took me a little while to recognize the values sown implicitly into that class. And assumed values are one thing, but the real problem here, as far as my internal consistency is concerned, is that, while we’re being given these values in one ear, we’re being instructed in the other to respect traditional culture no matter what – even if it conflicts with our own values. The very same professor who facilitated that panel has been so quick to say, so many times, “ah, but that’s just your opinion, isn’t it?” when someone states that it’s wrong to hit a child or force a woman to work for hours in the kitchen while her husband exercises the social privilege of interacting with the world or naps in front of the TV. We’ve been told that traditional culture has value, that we have to try to recognize that value even in attitudes or practices that repulse us. And, at the same time, we’re discussing ways that Africa can modernize economically, that the social position of women can be improved, that health practices can be brought up to date. The thing is, at some point you can’t have both. You can’t both respect the historical, cultural and religious tradition of Senegal that says that homosexuality is so wrong and at the same time want to “modernize” Senegalese views of homosexuality. One of them has to win. If we, the West, hold that modernity is social and economic liberalism, then we can’t modernize Africa and at the same time preserve traditional social and economic structures. We can’t say that this modernity is good for everyone and at the same time that everyone should keep their own culture. If we actually believe that there’s an overwhelming intrinsic good in the way things have been, then we can’t launch missions to help people by changing the way things are. Both our ideas and traditional ones can have value, sure, but at the end of the day seeking to bring our own change in health, economics or society constitutes, functionally, a judgment that the way things have been is less good than the way we’ve decided they should be.
And I’m not advocating one side of this. I’m not even saying that I think we need to choose one side or the other, categorically. It’s just starting to bother me that, even if there’s no easy answer, this hasn’t even been presented as a question. No one in all of the presentations we’ve gotten or classes we’ve had seems to have acknowledged that there can be a conflict between assuming that certain structures or worldviews are worth encouraging and advocating the preservation of traditional ways of behaving and seeing the world.
One of the goals I threw out in my first blog post was “to become an educated citizen of the world.” And I think I am doing that. I think my perspective has been pinched and stretched into a different shape. But I also think that one of the most striking things I’m finding here is that being a “citizen of the world” is not such a clear concept as I’d thought while blithely reading through my study abroad preparatory materials. No matter what I do to myself now, I’ll always have grown up in the United States, in my own town with the influence of my own parents and friends. I’ll always have first learned to see the world through a lens that casts pedestrian crosswalks as normal and toilet paper as essential, a lens through which every person is seen as having the right to occupy whatever social role he or she sees fit, regardless of age, gender, ethnic group, sexuality, whatever. And maybe, with great effort and a lot longer than my remaining two months in Africa, I could change some of the fundamentals of my instinctive ways of dealing with the world. What I couldn’t do, according to my understanding of logical consistency, is just continue indiscriminately adding bits of different worldviews onto mine. I can’t become a “global citizen” in the sense that I can’t be a composite of all the world. Some parts of who I am have already dried in place – I can’t go back and see what I would have been like had I grown up here, and I have no doubts that I would have been different. And some parts of what I believe are not compromises, but choices. I am vastly thankful that I’m getting this chance to see what exactly it is that I’m choosing from the outside in and to think about those choices in a more conscious way, even if it’s a bit daunting to start feeling like one of the ostensible goals of this whole study abroad thing is an internally inconsistent ideal.
So… to sum up the first half based on those initial goals:
Fluency in French? Progress.
Educated citizen of the world? We’re now unsure what this means.
Helping people? See above.
Do the best I can with what I have? Well, that one was always obnoxiously vague. But I’m trying, and I’m going to keep trying for the next two months.
Will I get better at Wolof? Will I acquire more mystery brothers? Will I find a solution to this irritating conflict of tradition and Western values?
Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve got two more months to go.