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A few nights ago, after accompanying Victoria to her host house, I walked the twenty minutes back on the route nationale with two Senegalese friends. While it was dark, it was only about eight thirty and we could see by the car lights streaming past us. Randomly, a shiny new truck pulled off the road. A middle aged white man, cigarette in hand, leaned out the window and called to us. We walked over and my friend whose French is the best out of the three of us stepped forward. He quickly indicated, however, that he wanted to speak with me. He told me he had seen me on the road before and wanted to make my acquaintance. Not wanting to be rude but feeling like this very forward man was being inappropriate and knowing that it would probably not be a good idea, I quickly searched for a way to kindly get rid of him. Before I could say anything my friend was already giving him my number. At that point there was nothing I could do but stand there. As I was walking away quickly as possible I realized my friend was still talking to him. A few minutes later she came running up clutching 4,000 CFA he had just given her.

When we returned to the house my two friends recounted the whole event to another friend as if we were freshmen in high school and I had just been asked to homecoming. The next day the usual “nanga deff” was replaced with “did he call?” He had but I decided not to answer. This news was met with shocked faces and exclamations of “why not!?” I tried to explain my reasoning to them but from the beginning I knew it would be difficult for them to understand since relationships are different in Senegal. Many women marry in their late teens and early twenties, often to men much older than them who already have money to support a family. In addition, Senegalese women tend to be open and flirtatious, so one of the most challenging things for many of my friends here to understand is that when I say I don’t want a boyfriend I mean it. Somewhere in the middle of all of this I realized that if any of my friends in the U.S had given my number to a complete stranger I would have been mad at them and thought they were crazy. But here, the culture and relationships between men and women are just different.

When we arrived in our rural locations, all of the Senegal fellows were given an assigned friend. This was a person outside of our home stay families who could show us around the community and introduce us to more people. I was lucky to be assigned a friendly, intelligent girl my age with a big, welcoming family. Having never been assigned a friend before at first I think we were both a little uncertain of our roles, but with similar personalities after sharing many meals, holidays and celebrations by now the friendship is much more genuine than assigned. Living across the street we see each other almost every day. Usually we sit in front of her mother’s boutique and watch people go by on the route nationale, or she will teach me something such as how to braid African hair or cook beignets. Often we talk about events taking place in the community or I ask her questions about Senegal. Sometimes we just sit in a comfortable silence and hang out, which has been difficult for me to learn how to do but necessary in Senegal.

Until this point, I have felt like I am comfortable with my Senegalese friends and act like myself around them. However, this recent situation made me aware that I have unconsciously been acting different with them than I do with my friends at home. I am not sure if this means that while I think I am my self around them I am really not or if I have just adapted to the cultural differences but what ever it is it has made me more conscious of how, while it may not be noticeable to others, throughout the past two months my actions, attitudes and even thoughts have slowly changed hopefully for the better.

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Last Saturday, the 15th of January, marked the halfway point of our seven-month stay in Senegal. Three and a half months down, three and a half to go. I find it hard to believe that we are already on the downward slope, when so many things are only just beginning.

In my apprenticeship at l’Ecole Sebiroute for example, I have suddenly found myself launched into a whole new array of exciting activities: introducing students to the computer lab and the library, starting an english club at the high school, and sitting in on women’s alphabetization classes (see previous blog…). I feel as though my first two months here were but a gradual preparation for being able to do what I do today; and I feel as though I’ve had to travel miles to get to this point of actually starting to work. Its like when you’re hiking in Maine and for the first good portion of the journey you’re under tree cover and you can’t be entirely sure of where you are or where you’re headed, or if you’ll ever break through. And then suddenly you break through the tree line and you can see all around you, and ahead of you – the fruits of your current and past labors. The path isn’t any easier, and often times it gets rockier and steeper. But still, its definitely the best part of the climb.

I’d like to dedicate this blog post to retracing the various steps I’ve been through in my apprenticeship, in order for any subsequent stories I’d like to tell to make any sense. I apologize in advance for the length of this blog, which probably should have been staggered in four or five previous others. But I decided it was needed, to give a more realistic picture of what its really like to be a volunteer. I stopped writing blogs about my apprenticehip for a while because nothing significant was happening. There have always been lots of exciting possibilities, but nothing was concrete enough to write about. Often, a day’s worth of ‘progress’ would consist of merely managing to have a casual conversation with a certain someone; although I rarely failed to find some way to occupy myself for the remaining five hours I would spend at the school.

For my main task over the past few months has been to determine my role within the school community, a challenging, delicate process considering what I had to work from. For the teachers at the school, I arrived on day one as nothing more than a nineteen year-old white girl who looked even younger, who had no teaching experience whatsoever, and who could barely speak French. No one was openly skeptical (the Senegalese are incapable of being anything but welcoming) but the obvious question hovering in the air, that even I began to ask myself, and that I sometimes still ask, was: what right on earth do I have to claim any role of significance within this school? Even if that role was going to consist merely of sitting around and watching?

I spent the first month, November, basically getting oriented – sitting in on classes, talking to teachers and observing the general goings on within and without the school walls. During this time I also started tutoring the teachers in their computer lab, which had basically been untouched until my arrival. Even though this might not have been my job of choice, I was glad and lucky to have found some way to have been of use so early on; to temporarily validate my presence. Also significant of my first month in my apprenticeship were the few times when, while sitting in on classes, the teachers would suddenly hand me the ruler and the rubber whip and send me to stand at the front of the class while they ‘went to toilet’ for sometimes up to a half hour. These first few failed attempts to control boisterous classes of forty to fifty little Wolof-speaking kids were a little discouraging to say the least. After having my fill of ‘observation’ I gradually retreated from the classrooms, thinking to myself that if I ever wanted to have a role teaching in this school, the typical classroom setting was not going to be the place for me. Teachers need to be loud and fierce, and to have a strong command of the local native language, Wolof, in order to have any authority. Loud and fierce would probably be the last words I would have used to describe myself, and I barely spoke a word of Wolof. To have proposed alternative methods would have just confused the kids and frustrated the teachers.

So I spent more and more time in the computer lab and in the library, and as time went on, especially in the library. This space, like the computer lab, had been out of use until one day, as though on a whim, the school director decided to let me peak inside. The library consisted basically of a roomful of dusty books all donated from France, stacked in what seemed like random piles on tables and shelves. Put a hand down on any flat surface and it would be covered in a reddish brown dust. There were ant hills clumping in the cracks of the floor, cobwebs dangling from the ceiling and the windows, and the skeletons of lizards and other crawly things lurking in corners. Many of the books were crawling with insects, the edges of their pages already eaten away.

Discovering the old registries of take-outs I saw that the library had indeed been in use for several years, from 2004 to 2007. Only a few take-outs in 2008 and I was literally the first for 2009. Apparently the story was that there used to be a librarian, but that two years ago she had been summoned to supervise the high school students, who had come to occupy the first two rows of classrooms belonging to this elementary school, when they ran out of space up at the middle school. (Sebikotane doesn’t have a high school, although according to my host mother they have already received a grant to build one and are merely in the process of choosing a site). Besides the strain imposed by the invasion of the high school students taking their classrooms and their librarian, the past two years were particularly hard on l’Ecole Sebiroute due to all the teacher strikes. Their salaries must have truly been abysmal, for the teachers to have justified abandoning their students for as long as they did. For although this school year has been relatively steady so far, the consequences of the past two are still felt. Students in the higher grades (4th -5th graders) are weak in essential skills they need to proceed in their education, and most evident among these, the ability to read.

Convincing the director to one day let me ‘move things around a little’ I soon set to the task of transforming the room full of dust and books into a library. This task occupied me for most of December and was very satisfying: both the physical labor of scrubbing and dusting and lifting, and the intellectual one of sorting each book into its appropriate section: reference, novels, classics and children’s sections. The children’s books interested me most, and I put a little extra care into the creation of a sort of ‘children’s corner,’ le coin des enfants, and from this you might be able to guess where my thoughts were headed, right from the very start. I have always been fond of children’s literature, and unlike all my friends who always changed their minds, when I was young (up until about high school when things got more complicated) I would tell anyone who asked me that my dream profession was to become an author and illustrator of children’s books. This is probably because the books and stories of my child hood, which my parents would read to me every night before bed, certainly had a profound impact on me – on the development of my imagination, my character, my ability to discern right from wrong.

And so as I scrubbed, dusted and sorted, sifting through what felt like a mysterious treasure vault of precious materials that I felt strangely fortunate to have stumbled upon (I mean really, how many volunteers are lucky enough to have a whole, untouched roomful of books at their disposal?), I had a lot of time to think – about the ability of books to expand one’s perspective on life, and about reading as the essential basis of a young person’s education. About my own personal experiences with books, and about the scarcity/nonexistence of books in Senegalese households. And then finally, about the widespread difficulties teachers were having with teaching kids how to read. Gradually each of these pieces slid into place, and by mid December seemed to fit together and solidify into one, simple, beautiful idea: why not introduce library activities?

A wonderful idea, yes, but the difficult part was of course going to be realizing it: all the practical details of precisely who, what, when, where, why and how. I started mentioning the idea to a few teachers here and there, and most responses were vaguely encouraging. Although, I realize now, most of them probably didn’t quite understand what I was talking about, or didn’t expect me to actually pursue the idea. For the teachers of l’Ecole Sebiroute have no shortage of good intentions; its just the step of actually starting things that is so easily pushed away, especially by people who are already ‘exhausted’ with their work and who frankly care more about their personal lives beyond school. How else could one explain how they managed to leave both a computer lab and a library locked up for over a year?

So I think it took everyone a little bit by surprise, when, one day in early January, I showed up at the doorstep of each classroom with a five page long letter and project proposal. I had spent a few days during the December vacation preparing this letter, in the wonderfully quiet, deserted computer lab. After spending a week gently pestering a bed-ridden M. Faye (the school director had fallen ill) to give his approval, we had the letter sent to Rufisque to have copies made. In the letter, I thanked the teachers for having welcomed me so graciously among them and then went on to explain that I had some ideas of projects that I would like to try with them, but that I needed their input, feedback and support in order to proceed. The two projects that I outlined were to a) start the computer classes for the students and b) to introduce the students to the freshly opened library with reading activities, ‘à la modele of what ‘we do in school libraries in the United States.’ I explained why these activities could be of value to them and their students and also to me personally. They’re not going to read your letter, M. Faye had warned me, trust me, I know them… But I had insisted that this was the best way I could think of to proceed.

The computer classes were relatively easy to get started considering everyone knew that these had been, after all, the whole purpose of the lab ever since the day it had been installed. The director himself made a schedule and all I had to do was hand it out and tell the teachers who had sent it. And then one day, one of the teachers decided to send all the girls in his class, into the lab to clean (boys never partake in ‘feminine’ tasks such as cleaning). Huge piles of dust were swept out the door, table tops were wiped down, and the plastic was finally removed from the fancy, extra-comfy black chairs. It was like a present finally unwrapped, and I felt that the day was a significant beginning. During the three weeks since, by following the schedule and dividing each class into groups, I have managed to teach six classes of forty to fifty kids the first most essential step in computering: how to use the mouse.

The library activities on the other hand, I knew, were going to be more difficult to get started. To hand out another schedule to ensure each class a slot during the week would have been too much, not just for the teachers, but for me as well. The idea, as outlined in my letter, was that those teachers who thought the activities I had described could be beneficial for their students, would approach me individually, to organize a specific time. Almost a week went by, and having yet to receive a single response or comment, I was starting to feel a little stupid, and to think I should have listened more carefully to M. Faye’s advice. The news from the other fellows, related to me through Victoria, the master-texter, was that we were all facing similar frustrations at this particular stage in our bridge years. The halfway point was approaching and we were each struggling with the same transition in our apprenticeships: the transition from passive observers to active members of our work-places, pursuing individually crafted projects.

And then suddenly, one day as I was preparing to leave for Dakar for our monthly meeting, a teacher called me over to her classroom as I passed. It was, I dare to say, the most unlikely teacher of all – Mme Lo, a young teacher who, after her first two years in the profession, visibly despises her job. ‘So when are you going to start the activities in the library?’ she asked me. ‘Well how about next Monday?’ I asked. ‘I’ll spend some time observing your class and then I’ll take the first small group out whenever it won’t be too disruptive.’

And, simple as cake, that was how my ‘idea’ finally, miraculously, two and a half months since my arrival in Sebikotane, came to life. I hope to write more about this soon – about collecting hay, sticks and bricks, and learning how to say ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ in Wolof – but that will have to wait until after I have sufficiently recovered from this epic post. I hope at the very least, this clears things up a little bit.

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It is nine thirty on thursday evening and someone has just installed a new loudspeaker in Sebikotane, right above my bedroom. And currently blaring from this speaker, for the past half hour or so, is what seems to be a never ending chant of verses from the Qur’an. Every once in a while the voices will abruptly cease, and for a minute or so I’ll hear only the distant chatter of all the other loudspeakers in Sebikotane, but then it’ll start up again on a fresh verse. Usually I really don’t mind all the loudspeakers and the singing, and sometimes even find it soothing, but there is something about this new one (maybe the fact that it was installed, uh, right above my room) that makes this singer sound particularly off-key, and the accompanying mush of voices particularly static, and the screeches particularly sharp. I think tonight’s broadcasting must have somthing to do with the fact that tomorrow is Friday, the day of the week when all the men go to the mosque, and everyone dresses in their nicer boubous, but most evenings of the week are rarely without some sort of background narration. And if all the loudspeakers are taking a break, my neighbor, an arabic teacher who rents the room next to mine, never neglects to fill the silence with verses recorded on his cellphone, which he listens to while he prepares his academic charts, sitting at the wooden table where I am now, wearing his funny little winter hat with the pom-pom.

Anyways, I sat down this evening to write a blog post about more practical things (such as my apprenticeship, and don’t worry its on its way) but then the racket started and I felt the moment was only just right for writing a a little bit about our discussions of this past weekend, on Islam. This past weekend, we GCY fellows were in Dakar for our second monthly meeting. As is typical for our monthly meetings we spent a good portion of the time seated around table in Rachel’s living room either talking or eating – assuaging our cravings for good food, english conversation, and believe it or not, academic activity. Away from school for over seven months by now, you’d think we’d been starved for knowledge or something – the way we gulped down the information that Rachel emitted so profusely, diving into the good old tasks of “notetaking” and reading fine print. “Intellectual Stimuli” is what Matt calls it.

The topic of interest for this monthly meeting was Islam, an extremely relevent topic here in Senegal, and one that I knew surprisingly very little about considering I am exposed to concrete manifestations of this religion every hour of every day here in Senegal (including when I’m lying in my bed at ten o’clock in evening, trying to get some sleep, and it feels like someone is standing right behind me singing into a microphone). If anything, the information that I have gathered from our discussions this weekend, on the history, the structure, and the theory of Islam, has reinforced my understanding of how incredibly powerful religious figures and beliefs are in Senegalese society. I’ve always kind of thought of religion as something supplementary to one’s life, just a part of the whole, and its fascinating to start to think of religion as the basis for one’s life. Fascinating to think about the ability of human beings to cultivate and spread faith, and the depth of this faith.

Last night I left the school a little later than usual, having stayed to write this blog post. It was almost seven oclock and the sun was setting and so, sure enough, the call to prayer rang out just as I exited to school gates: timis. The path leading from l’ecole sebiroute to my house was darkening and nearly deserted, and as I walked home, feeling a little uneasy and perhaps guitly, to be out at this sacred hour, it suddenly occurred to me how incredible it is to imagine just how many people in Senegal, and in West Africa, were standing at the borders of their prayer mats at that very moment. And how millions of others had done the same only hours before, assembling like fields of dominos facing Mecca, in the shadow left by the setting sun. I thought about the few times back in the US when somehow a national “moment of silence” would be organized, to acknowledge a tragedy involving many deaths, and how significant those few moments were for us. September eleventh, for example. And here that sort of thing happens every day. Every day, five times a day, the Muslims of Senegal are united in their thoughts, in silent contemplation of God. I thought about faith and doubt, about order and society, solidarity and unity. I thought about how big the world is, and how distant the sun…

And if religious ideas and faith can cross borders, can span continents and can connect people of different ethnicities, nationalities and races, why not others?

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The morning is still dark as I sit in my Ndiaga Ndiaye on the way to Rufisque. The single light bulb hanging from a failing red wire illuminates me, casting a grand silhouette, maybe four times my size, on the passing scenery.

The past few weeks I have been getting a wealth of opinions on aid projects in Senegal from different people. Always associated with the white foreigner, the missions seems to be like my shadow-bloated, by inefficiencies and lack of follow up. There is plenty of money being thrown into the aid pot. For if you have a cause, there is likely to be someone supporting it, from environmental protection to helping school children to mental illness. The main difference seems to come from what creates the shadow. Is there something concrete behind it, or is it just the wind?

The first popular path is the politicians route where one procures the aid funding (from the government or an aid organization), creates a project that is usually focused around “sensiblisation” (informing part of the population), obtains volunteers, feeds and gives shirts to these volunteers with half of the funding, and finally keeps the last half of the funding to fill up the coffers. Corruption is rampant in almost all developing countries and on the rise in Senegal specifically. However, there are some projects where only the government can sufficiently address the problem. As private organizations who give to the campaigns though, NGOs have the opportunity to see exactly where their money is going and what it is doing.  For their caused can be worthy, but if the money and effort do nothing but further a fraudulent system, what is the point?

The next path is a half support system, represented perfectly in my apprenticeship site of the Village des Tortues. It was created with the help of SOPTCOM, the European Union, the Senegalese government, and other donators. Currently my host father acts as the representative of SOPTCOM for the Village, working there around twice a week. The major issue within the Village itself is the structure that now exists. It was started, and can now subsist and function by itself, but there is no real room for improvement. Every now and then the government will give money if there is not enough to feed the turtles, or SOPTCOM will donate something or other to help update the Village, like a computer. Both resources give the Village a bigger safety net up to a certain point, allowing it to beg at both ends when there is some dire need, but never really let it progressively function independently. Just like this confused system, the actual impact of the Village des Tortues is buried underneath possibilities and dead ends.

Then there is the rare path of possible success, where there is a solid impact behind that wispy shadow of promotion. Hilary and I recently started working at L’Ecole la Sagesse, a private school helped along by a Canadian group that emphasizes teaching methods other than repetition. While their upper levels have not reached their potential yet, the lower schools have an unheard of near perfect success rate. Besides test scores, you can see the impact by just talking to a child and hearing something in return that is less of a parakeet, and more of an honest answer. Yet we still must wait and see what will happen in the future with the students, if they in fact will grow up to look outside of the “normal Senegalese box,” which is literally full of the same material it was when their grandparents were in school.

These routes of aid offer much hope, for in any case they show that people still care-  that we have not settled into a normalcy alongside travesties. Though these Senegalese exhibits of aid do present a dire need, that being for the organizations and people to take a complete stake in the ownership and the impact of what they do. For the most part, there is no lack of ideas, just a lack in seeing that some things need the new dreams.

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Friday the 15th marked the halfway point of our stay in Senegal. I’ve been keeping close track of the days, and feeling the halfway mark looming upon me was, frankly, kind of depressing.  A month ago, I had written a proposal detailing all the activities I wanted to initiate at the preschool. The director approved it the day I submitted it, and said he would explain it to the preschool teacher. After a week, I tried to organize a meeting between the three of us. While I waited for that meeting to take place, I continued what I’d been doing at the school – helping the kids color, opening snacks, handing out materials, and drawing the curricula on the boards. A month passed while I waited, and I decided to just explain it to the teacher myself on Wednesday. I launched into a long, painful speech in my stunted French, and she listened and nodded. Then she brought me a stack of 50 notebooks and told me to copy the same picture into all of them (I’ve been designated official artist, because they somehow think my atrocious drawing skills are fabulous) so that the kids in my group could color the next day. She had obviously missed my entire point – that coloring every day was getting them nowhere, that I was tired of being forced to draw pictures and make endless paper chains, that I was not accomplishing anything at this apprenticeship. As I sat there, drowning in a sea of empty, waiting notebooks, I could feel a scream rising rapidly inside my throat. I was perilously close to either letting it out or bursting into an absolute torrent of tears.

That was and will undoubtedly be my lowest point throughout this bridge year. That Saturday, there had been an extremely uncomfortable situation with my host family. Sunday, I got the news that my aunt had just succumbed to her fight with pancreatic cancer. I took some time off work to cry and calm myself down and when I returned, I was still pretty high-strung. When that conversation happened, the frustration and feeling of helplessness that had been building up over the past week completely took over. Luckily, I refrained from exploding, knowing that would distress the teachers to no end, and that moment became a pivotal one for me.

I truly love GCY. I think the program is absolutely phenomenal and plan on being one of the loudest, most enthusiastic voices promoting the GCY experience when I return to the States. However, if there is one flaw in GCY’s modus operandi, I think it’s an overemphasis on the “changing the world” aspect of the bridge year. Discussion with the other Fellows revealed that they felt the same way – we all applied for this eager to run off and “save” a Third World village. But having those expectations made us all start feeling discouraged once the halfway point approached, and I’m now glad I had that near-breakdown because it prompted an invaluable conversation with Rachel and the other Fellows.

Thank goodness that the monthly meeting fell on the halfway day, because we all needed to remind each other of our “meaning” here. Every Fellow is, of course, making a difference just by being here, living in these communities, but I think we were still clinging to a certain vision of “making a difference,” in a semi-unrealistic way. We are supposed to be training ourselves to help “save the world” once we have a college education and some more life experiences under our belts. I’ve been saying this whole time that this GCY bridge year is more about me than the people of Senegal – after all, I was just a 17-year-old high school grad when I got here, what could I really offer them? I often repeated that I was going to learn much more than I could ever teach. There is no doubt that I am learning more about social development and different cultures this year than I have throughout my entire life. I am learning mostly, however, about myself – where my limits lie, how I best fit into the social work scene, and what genuinely makes me happy. I’ve been saying all along that was the point of taking this bridge year, but I guess I had kind of forgotten.

For the meeting, Rachel had us all write project plans for the remainder of our time here. We are so lucky to have that woman with us – she has been essential both to saving our sanity and pushing us to think critically and academically about everything we’re going through. I poured myself into that paper, reflecting on things I have already learned and setting realistic goals that will help me learn more. I’ve totally refocused on learning, learning, learning, so that I can be 100% better prepared for college and, hopefully, be able to come back after college and actually facilitate some of these great changes. Now that I’ve fully reminded myself of my reasons for taking this bridge year, I am so incredibly happy I have the next three and a half months to throw myself fully into the experience.