I’ve been taking a look back at my 2000-odd pictures from this semester — and I’ll get some more of those up on my site sooner or later — and the overwhelming thought I’ve been having is not, “Wow, this is pretty interesting,” but rather, “Wow, I did a lot of crap over the past five months.”  Not bad crap — just a ton of stuff.  Being there definitely affected me in ways enumerated in this post, but I have no oversimplified conclusions to give about my time in Senegal. [...]

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all. It turns out that Friday is just Tabaski Preparation Day, or something. So I have work off but the big holiday isn’t until tomorrow. Anyway: You’ve heard all these stories before in various forms. And I’ll spoil the somewhat worn conclusion, that life everywhere is complicated and it’s hard enough to understand the issues without even having to think about solutions. Nonetheless, I’m still writing this post because the specifics of the complexities of some facets of life here are pretty interesting and different than [...]

In Wolof, the first question asked when meeting or running into someone is “Nanga def?” which essentially translates to “How are you doing?”  The proper response is “Maangi fi,” or “I am here.”  This seems particularly appropriate given that I am, in fact, now here at my internship site, Ngaye Mekhe. After exchanging parting gifts with my family on Tuesday night — I gave them T-shirts, they gave me doughnuts and chocolate spread — I woke up the next morning at 5:30 to begin the next phase of my time [...]

In between playing online trivia games in class, organizing my next semester, and thinking about big issues like development (ooooh), I actually do try to do cool things with my time here. Here’s a brief slideshow of my recent activities: And a bunch of other new pics are up at my site, going back to near the beginning of September. Starting from the top, I went last weekend with the members of the environment class, which I’m auditing, to the Ile de la Madeleine. We took a 20-minute motorboat ride [...]

A few weeks ago, during the presession, we took a field trip to the island of Ngor, off the northwest tip of Dakar, to conduct interviews with strangers on the beach on the subject of polygamy.  We were informed that Waly and co. had bought food for our lunch there.  Naturally, given my concept of what a portable lunch should be, I was excited for the possibility of sandwiches and maybe, if we were lucky, some fruit.  My cold-cut dreams were shattered when I was asked to carry a large [...]

I do my best to comport myself in ways that make people think I’m not stupid.  A casual visitor of this site, however, might not get that impression.  There are continuous references to development throughout the blog; I wrote a whole post about it before coming to Senegal, for example, and the title of my program (Minnesota Studies in International Development) indicates that I’m here to learn something about it.  It would be easy to conclude from these (and similar) examples that I’m some idiot who thinks that by studying somewhere [...]

I’ve decided to change things up this time and save my general update for last. As is clear given that I’m posting, we arrived back from Toubacouta safely this past Sunday night after a very nice five-day trip. The hotel was great; the rooms were air-conditioned, and there was a decent-sized swimming pool.   (Unfortunately, the swimming pool and I finished the weekend on bad terms, as I slipped on the side of the pool while playing a game and cut up my foot badly enough to need a doctor [...]

Sorry for the long time between posts. Some updates: My 6-week internship has now been confirmed; starting October 25, I’ll be in Mekhe, a town of 15,000 about 3 hours northeast of Dakar. I’ll be working in a microfinance institution called Femme Developpement Entreprise en Afrique that gives small loans exclusively to women. (I guess I should translate: Women’s Development Enterprise in Africa. ) Their website is here, but this is the Google-translated version of the site for the non-francophones. More to come on this later. Ramadan is now over, [...]

I hope that just as interesting as my descriptions of life here are my reactions to it, and so I’d like to take some time out to talk about culture. (I guess this counts as part of my series on life in Dakar…I now realize that I could probably categorize every one of my posts as that, save my ones about trips to Gambia and other similar things.) So, as I documented in my first post after arriving, time is treated very differently here. Using economic terms, I would say [...]

I guess it should technically be To The Gambia and back.  Anyway, as you can tell from the title, I am in fact back, and now have a horribly long blog post to show for it.  The 20 other kids in my group (the ones who didn’t do the presession) have now arrived, making our group complete with a round 29.  Our program’s orientation is now done, and classes start tomorrow.  I doubt I’ll devote a post just to describing the other members of my group, but hopefully our character [...]

First in a series of posts about everyday life in Dakar. Tomorrow is the last day of the August presession, and fall semester orientation starts on Monday, meaning we have four days off to spend as we please. So three friends and I are taking a 7-place bush taxi down to The Gambia, which, for the geographically handicapped, is the tiny country that lies entirely within Senegal except for its west coast. I hear that it’s pretty striking in terms of natural beauty, but I can report further when I [...]

I have a couple addendums to my last post about Sokone. First is that I now have a Senegalese name: Souleymane Diop. I got Souleymane from my friend Casimir, who studies English at the university in Dakar. He was (or is) probably my best friend among the group of those students, and when I remarked that I didn’t as of yet have a Senegalese name, he gave me Souleymane. My picture with Casimir is pretty terrible, so here’s one of him attempting unsuccessfully to braid my friend Alex’s hair. And [...]

As I briefly alluded to, we spent last week participating in the “Vacances Citoyennes” run by the Cheikh Anta Diop University (also known as UCAD, and Senegal’s biggest university). Translated pretty literally, “Vacances Citoyennes” means “Citizen Vacations.” And although there was certainly some Citizenship (whatever that means), there was a lot of Vacation. The Vacances Citoyennes is a yearly program that allows students to opt to do a couple weeks of community service at the beginning of their vacation (which runs, pretty unbelievably, from August to January). Students go to [...]

…as promised.  For those who would be inclined to ask. The first question the curious masses have been asking is why I chose to go to Senegal. I like lists, so here’s one to answer that question: They speak French in Senegal.  I speak French (or try to). I hear that they (another they) speak French in France, too. But I figured it’d be more interesting to get to experience a developing country as part of a structured program, which is an unlikely opportunity after college (especially one in Africa). [...]