Lone Goat on the Road

It looks like I will be staying in Senegal a bit longer. I was recently offered the position of “Program Officer” for the NGO (Non-governmental organization) Tostan, based in Dakar. I am absolutely thrilled about this opportunity because Tostan is doing wonderful work in West Africa, particularly in its efforts to promote human rights and end harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital cutting. I will be working primarily with Tostan’s founder, Molly, on the trainings she has been increasingly offering to other organizations wanting to learn Tostan’s approach to development work. I will be based in Dakar, but I will travel to Thies frequently because Tostan’s training center is located there. So no more excuses for NOT visiting me: flights from Europe to Senegal are cheap😊

December 22, 2017

The highlight of my day in village is breakfast. Every morning, I wake up around 8 am, take a brief bucket shower, get dressed, and then walk over to the boutique next door to buy “cheese” (it is actually cheese spread; real cheese is only available in Kolda – sometimes – or Dakar) or an egg, a packet of dried milk, and a loaf of tapalapa. Tapalapa is the local, Senegalese version of baguette. It is made from the same flour, but it is denser than regular baguette (called “machine” here). It is absolutely delicious. It is, in fact, one of my top 3 favorite foods in Senegal (the other two being hibiscus – either as a juice or a sauce that goes with fish and rice – and “Thiakry”, sweet yogurt with couscous).

The tapalapa at my boutique is particularly good because it has just the right amount of crunch on the outside and softness on the inside. Yes, I know what I am talking about because I have, of course, taste tested tapalapas all around the country. Ironically, just as the Senegalese prefer imported, broken white rice over locally-grown millet because it is considered more “fancy”, they will choose machine bread over tapalapa, the village bread, even though tapalapa is cheaper and more filling. It makes absolutely no sense to me. It is, however, yet another beautiful reminder that as different as we peoples of the world are, we are also often alike: whether we are German, American, or Senegalese, we all like to imitate or emulate the rich, powerful, and famous. We like (or dream) to dress like them, eat like them, act like them. Of course most of us have no idea how they actually live, but we tend to believe what we are told or shown by others, including, most notably, television. The Senegalese, for example, believe that life in America is paradise; they think that every American is extremely rich and has no problems.* This message is conveyed in most American movies that run on Senegalese TV, and people do not understand that the reality looks very different. And so it should come as little surprise that most Senegalese teenagers look like they are fresh off a Hip Hop video shoot, complete with chunky gold chains and earrings, flashy sneakers, and bold t-shirts, jeans, and caps.

This act of imitation, tough often ridiculed, can be and is often used positively: today, it seems, most causes (environmental, social, political) are associated with one or multiple celebrities. What is Al Gore most famous for today? His environmental work. And Angelina Jolie? Yes, people know her for her marriage to Brad Pitt and her many children, but I would argue that they have also heard about her work as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN. These celebrities try to affect positive change by encouraging others to do as they do, to imitate them. Surprisingly, positive change through imitation is possible even when the message or the medium is not expressly educational, as, for example, cable television. However, a 2009 study** on rural India shows that birth rates decreased and female enrollment rates in school increased after the introduction of cable television.

The Senegalese are completely nuts about Indian movies and television shows, but, unfortunately, it seems not to have (noticeably) affected the same positive change in rural Senegal as it has in rural India. Birth rates continue to be high and female enrollment rates in school low. So what can we do here? How can we convince parents to pay for school for all their children when they have barely enough money to pay for food? When the potential benefits are so far off and they are only living from day to day? When tapalapa, which costs 100 CFA a loaf (roughly $0.20), is only consumed by the wealthy in village?

* In comparison to their lives, they are probably right.

December 16, 2017

I recently saw a picture on Facebook of two fellow volunteers posing behind the trash they had produced over the course of one year (they are a couple). In the accompanying post, one of them explained that the roughly six rice sacks contained only plastic trash; they had composted organic waste and burned paper. They had also tried to reuse as much plastic as possible, for example as shopping bags or as bags for tree sprouts. Nonetheless, the remaining trash seemed significant to her, all the more so as the village where the two of them live does not have a waste management system. Trash in their village is recycled as much as possible (the Senegalese reuse plastic bottles, for example, to fill them with water or juice) and then dropped on the spot or collected in compounds and then dropped at a commonly accepted “drop site” somewhere close by. The trash at these drop sites is regularly lighted on fire, making the smell of burning plastic a common, yet unpleasant occurrence in the community.

The situation she described is not unique. In fact, it is exactly the same in my village and most villages in Senegal. Most Senegalese cities have waste collection systems and, possibly, recycling programs in place. Villages generally do not. And even in the places with waste collection systems you can see trash everywhere because, as she mentioned, people just drop it where they walk, even in their own compounds. There are no trash cans. This behavior was perfectly fine (or at least manageable) for thousands of years. Everything was biodegradable after all. But then came plastic. And as the Senegalese primarily buy in single portions (because they do not have the money, space or refrigeration to buy in bulk), the amount of loose plastic bags and packaging for these portions is particularly alarming. For example, the Senegalese love to drink water from small “sachets” that cost 50 cfa (roughly 9 cents US), and these sachets are absolutely everywhere.

That’s not to say that the Americans are better.* In fact, they are much worse as we all well know. This includes me. I have always considered myself very environmentally conscious: I recycle my trash, I try to avoid plastic as much as possible, I buy locally and seasonally, and, most importantly, I don’t own a car. But I know that the one (rice) bag of plastic trash I produced in Senegal in a year I would have produced in the US in two weeks, or maybe a month. The amount of packaging alone we use in the US is mindboggling. And yes, I loved my daily iced coffee in New York which came in a plastic cup with a straw; I would never have thought about bringing my own cup.

It’s just that the trash is so much more visible here in Senegal. Every single can of Fanta I drink, every bag of “kosam e lacciri” (=yogurt with couscous) I eat makes me think of the trash it will create. And the day when my trash bag is full and needs to be disposed of is fast approaching. I am not looking forward to that day. Fortunately, it has only has happened once before (I have filled two rice sacks with trash in my 19 months in Medina Yoro Foulah). Some of the kids in my village had come into my room and asked me if they should get rid of my trash. I realized then that my rice sack was full. Something had to be done with it.** I reluctantly agreed to them making the bag disappear.

I should have known, of course, that they would go through the trash. They found an old concealer of mine and decided to draw designs on their heads with it (note: my concealer is my skin color). When I asked them what they had done, they repeated “Neymar” over and over again. When I finally guessed that they were not speaking Pulaar and had, in fact, tried to imitate the hair designs of the Brazilian soccer player, I laughed as never before in Senegal. The Senegalese really are ingenious in their recycling!

* It's actually laughable to mention the two in the same sentence because Senegal is such a tiny blip in comparison to the US.