Village Visit

I signed up for IHP in part because I knew that I knew nothing about cities (I still do, but at least now I have a better sense of what it is that I don't know). Up until now, I've had a lot of opportunities to travel, but I have mostly only gone to rural places - communities in Mexico, Panama, and Nicaragua. While in Senegal I got to visit a village there, and it was an incredibly fun and full two nights. We danced, watched a wrestling match, learned to grind millet and built mud bricks for houses, cooked, ate, took bucket baths, held lots of interviews, and ate massive amounts of food from our warm and thoughtful hosts.

Let's do a little compare and contrast:

Part of me felt immediately at home. The mothers asking you to eat more and more and more food (and beaming like the sun if you do); the children eagerly wanting to wrestle and play Simon Says and crowd around you to see your camera after you take a photo; the availability of chickens to clean up any scraps of food left lying around; the feeling of calm that comes from there being little to no light after the sun goes down - and the spectacular views of the stars overhead when it does; the unspoken expectations that in a community if somebody is struggling then someone else will be there to help, and that if you schedule something for 2:00 really things will start rolling around 3:00 or 4:00 - all of these stood as vivid reminders of what it felt like to be an American visiting rural communities all over Central America.

The compound where I stayed - sorry these are just buildings not people! I still don't feel comfortable posting photos of people on my blog without them knowing about it... Note how all the doors face towards each other so when you leave your house, you're immediately greeted by the family members who live next door.

But part of me was also feeling a disconnect, a sense that my surroundings were mysteriously unfamiliar and not at all like what I was used to seeing either in the country where I was born, or in the other places where I've spent enough time to get more or less comfortable. Everything was in Wolof, not Spanish, and the language barrier was intense. Many families were polygamous. There was sand and not dirt; it was flat and not hilly; I was there during the dry season, without the reliable three hours of downpour that come each afternoon during the rainy months in Central America. Thirty-seven friends that I already knew were there with me. And everybody knew we were only there for a few nights, there with only the goals to study and to learn.

I believe that there is something universally beautiful about a community of people that think of themselves as a community, and that have continuity in that community for generations and generations.

I believe that there is something universally inspiring about how resilient, strong, and creative humans are capable of being when living with not many material resources, and lots of uncertainty.

I believe that it's an amazing privilege to get to witness things that are so beautiful and inspiring.

Center of the village

But other than that, I'm not sure what I believe. I have lots of thoughts about lots of questions after visiting lots of places around the world, but they're still not coherent enough for me to feel comfortable publishing them online just yet. There are a few thoughts floating around in my head, though, that I think should go online:

People back home can be quick to tell anybody who does volunteer work outside of Western Europe or the northern part of North America that they are amazing for going out there and solving poverty in poor, rural parts of poor, developing countries. This glosses over so many complicated questions about the definition of "poverty"; about variety across different continents and countries and regions and towns and human beings; about similar work being done in countries with higher GDP's; about what different "volunteer" or "development" projects really do and why - way too much complexity to bother writing about right now.

But I think that the tendency in the States to gloss over all that complexity can lead us to almost assume that anybody from a country with a high GDP who even spends time in a country with a low GDP is somehow saintly - that we, for example, are contributing to a fight against global poverty by just showing up in this village for two nights. I don't think that's right...

...I do think that as many people as possible should have the chance to go visit a place that they think of poor, rural, and developing so that they can make connections with actual human beings and realize the limits of what they know about their lives; realize the limits of labeling a place with those words; realize that now they have connections with actual human beings in one village of one country of one continent, which cannot speak for the actual human beings who live in thousands of other villages around the world.

I am aware that when I come back to the United States, many people that I talk to about IHP will expect me to speak for all of Africa. I cannot do that. I can speak about my experience for a limited amount of time with one family in Dakar, with one community near Toubacouta - and this is more powerful because it is more realistic.

...And I'm also starting to think that our "you-must-be-fighting-poverty-oh-good-for-you" tendency has something to do with the focus of our news media in Africa. Rarely in any news story published in the United States about anything happening in Africa, does the author do any work to distinguish the location he or she is writing about from all the rest of Africa. This encourages us to fall into the cliched trap of thinking of the entire continent as one country.

And a huge proportion of those news stories cover three topics: AIDS, female genital mutilation, and starvation. Three clearly bad things that now make us fall into the trap of thinking of the entire continent of Africa as one country where everything everywhere is going horribly wrong.

Well, as it turns out, AIDS and female circumcisions and starvation do not figure into the daily realities of the vast majority of people living in Dakar, and in the village that we visited. Surprising as this may sound, most people I have met here actually do not go around all day filled with a crushing fear about how everything everywhere is going horribly wrong.

The world's a really big, really complicated place. Think of it as a massive pile of unorganized data, and not all the data is of the same kind. We go and live our lives and collect bits and pieces of this data all the time. It is up to us to find matrices to contain that data as well as we can, to acknowledge that no matrix will ever be able to contain all of it but that we still need to always look for a better and better matrix. As I try to do that (as maybe you do, too) I want to always remember that sometimes we already have matrices in our heads and we don't even know it, and sometimes those matrices might be really limiting and skewed ones...like the ones constructed by media sources that describe all of Africa as one country where everything everwhere is going horribly wrong.