Sunday I move out of my home-stay. It's been a strange week, knowing that the end is coming. Normally I would have been extra social to compensate for my imminent departure, but I've been so swamped with work that I haven't had much spare time to play. Additionally the girls are on vacation from school this week, so they've spent the past few days at their grandmother's house. It makes our tiny home feel eerily quiet, not having small girls screaming or crying all the time. I managed to actually be productive at home yesterday, a first for me for the entire semester. It's terrifying that I've been wrapping everything up -- presentations, papers, discussions synthesizing this adventure in cultural immersion... For those staying in Dakar I think it feels a lot less like "the end." For me, I'm bracing myself to legitimately say goodbye to a bunch of people for a while. (Two and a half weeks, but that's a lot in study abroad time...) I'll be more or less alone, with the exception of a few visits from a friend coming to take voice lessons nearby. I may be the only toubab (white person) living in this town... It's been a great week at home, though. I think in Saint-Louis I forgot that I do really like and care about Aby and Bashir -- I was so caught up in all their drama and my frustration at having to deal with it that I forgot why I had initially enjoyed being let into their weird little marriage. Even in these final days I feel like both of them are continuing to open up to me, sharing their lives (and of course their food) with me. They're all pretty upset that I'm leaving, which is incredibly flattering. Soukeyna especially seems distraught, though I've promised that I'll come to her birthday dinner on the 6th (with a present and everything!) I'm not sure that I'm ready to "say goodbye" to them yet -- luckily I don't officially have to until my last day in Dakar on May 16th -- but I'm definitely glad to be leaving while I feel so positively about them. Bashir even asked me to look for summer work in Dakar so that I could come back after Burt's graduation and stay with them for longer. It's incredible to think how far I've come with them, from that first weekend where I locked myself in the courtyard all the way through to today, where I feel so comfortable there that at times I forget that I'm white and their exchange student. How incredible that it feels like my house, where I'm renting a room or something maybe, not even... I don't know, the relationship doesn't really make sense. It feels so natural these days, it's hard to remember a time when it wasn't.
Otherwise this week hasn't been too exciting... Lots of work. I've been doing a lot of reflecting, both on what I've learned about myself and on what I've learned about Dakar and Senegalese culture. It's unreal to think that I'm in the home stretch now...
Sunday I move all my stuff into my beach apartment with 6 other girls at N'gor (!!) on the northern edge of Dakar, Dakar being kind of a triangular-shaped peninsula. I'll stay there until Tuesday morning, getting everything in order for my ISP. And then Tuesday I'm off! Moving to Bayakh, meeting Roger whom I'll be shadowing for a week, moving into his house... It's going to be fast and spontaneous, but I think it's going to be great. In case I haven't explained my project, I'll be living in a town that is surrounded by villages where USAID does development work. I'll spend the first week shadowing a Senegalese man named Roger, a friend of my Wolof professor Matou, and learning about the realities of poverty-reduction strategies. Where is the money going? What are the specific projects being worked on? Have they been successful so far? Is the money being well spent? Then the second week I'll select a specific strategy or village and do an in-depth study, completing interviews of USAID personnel and village residents, all designed to gauge the effects of development work on local cultures and whether or not USAID is appreciated there. The metaphor from the beginning of this post just has to do with how few details I know going in... But that's the Senegalese way! And no matter what happens, I'm going to have interesting things to talk about. Plus, I'll come back and have 8 days to live in an apartment on the beach with nothing to do but write a 40 page paper (ugg...) But I'll need study breaks, right? :o)
I'll try to post again before I leave on Tuesday... Maybe I'll have some exciting stories from the weekend. Bashir still wants to take me out clubbing, after all... We'll see if that happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment