-Dance with Host Families
Arriving
at my permanent site!
I’m done with training! Thank God.
Although it was the most comprehensive job training that I’ve ever had, it was
more wearing than I thought it would be.
I now live in , Kaffrine, in a town of 4,000 people. That number is a
little misleading because we are the largest town in a 45-minute radius. People
from all the neighboring villages come to our town to shop, go to school, and go
to the clinic. Kaffrine is a region that even people who have visited Senegal
have never heard of. I believe it is only known within Senegal as the peanut
basin, famous for nothing else. It’s desert, but there are giant boabab trees
breaking up the horizon.
By the standards of Peace Corps
sites in Africa, I’m living lavishly. I have one light bulb and one electrical
outlet in my “studio apartment.” Electricity comes on for 10 hours a night. My
family is very sweet, and we have an outdoor spigot where the dozen of us get
our water. I have to ask for the key when I want water, I guess families with
wealthy enough to have spigots are afraid that people will steal their water,
so they lock them.
My new name is Khady Diop. My
first name was Aida, after Aisha, Mohammed’s child bride. Khady is short for
Khadija, Mohammed’s first wife, who was his boss and twice his age. I guess
it’s an upgrade. My sister is also named Khady Diop. My teenage brother is
named Khadim Diop. This makes things incredibly confusing in our compound.
Within 48 hours of my being here, hundreds of people in town knew my name. I don’t
think I can change it now. My host dad is a sweet man with four wives. The
polygamy component to our family feels bizarrely normal. My family has been
really accommodating of me, and they are very respected in town.
Girl’s
Scholarship Initiative
I have been in my new town for six
days and I had a great day the other day. I explained to the teachers at the
junior high about the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship program, and I had a
moment of realization:
Here I am, speaking French to
teachers in a rural community that are as excited about girl’s education as I
am. Am I really doing this? This is exactly the kind of work I want to be
doing.
Despite the fact that I’ve lived
abroad before, Peace Corps has seen me shed a lot of tears. Yet again, I’ve
moved to a town where I don’t know anyone. Sometimes this job is awful,
sometimes it’s gross (you don’t want to see my “toilet”) and sometimes it’s
completely worth it.
I think it was divine intervention
that I came to my town. Before coming to Senegal, I knew I wanted to focus on
working with women. During training I realized that I could to do this by
focusing on family planning and on girl’s education. Peace Corps Senegal puts a
huge emphasis on improving women’s independence. As I was saying, my town is
perfect for this interest of mine: not only does the town have three women’s
groups, but they also have a sexual ed club at the junior high for boys and
girls. And it isn’t abstinence only! That’s progressive even for some states in
the US. One of the women’s groups focuses on micro-savings (the closest bank is
an hour away). Most women in Senegal do not generate income, but some jobs are
exclusively for women, like street vending. In many families, men distribute
their salaries amongst their wives and the women shop for their kids.
Today a few schoolteachers and I
proctored an essay for our scholarship candidates. Nine girls from 7th
to 9th grade wrote about their future goals. A few said they wanted
to be policewomen (wasn’t expecting that one) and others said they wanted to be
sage femmes (mid-wives).
When asked about how they would improve the education of girl’s in their
community, all nine of the girls said that they would stop arranged marriages,
“les marriages forces et le grossesses précoces.” Waangari Maathai once wrote
that Westerners believe that African women are unaware of the injustice they
face. Reading the essays and hearing the girls talk about wanting to postpone
childbirth, I would agree with Maathai that African women are quite aware of
what they are up against. For me one of the things I don’t like to witness
about women’s roles here is the sheer monotony of their day-to-day. Cooking and
washing clothes for dozens of people everyday without electricity, running
water, or modern appliances is time consuming and just plain dull.
Along those lines, all nine of my
scholarship candidates wrote that they would take care parents and siblings in
the future. I don’t know if I’ve ever said something like that.
All nine of my girls will have
their school fees paid for next year, and in the next six weeks the pool will
be narrowed to three winners who will receive additional school supplies as a
grand prize. The scholarship is structured like a US college scholarship: the
finalists will now have to be interviewed and get a teacher recommendation.
Lastly I will go to their houses to interview their parents about their
thoughts on education.
At first I had qualms with the scholarship program it
sounded too much like a child sponsorship program. Child sponsorships are one
of the most successful campaigns in the world of development, however they only
give aid to a few children within a community, usually the most photogenic and
marketable ones. Although only 9 girls from my junior high will win free
tuition, I’m OK with it because we are picking the girls with the highest
grades and they will go through a rigorous process. The teachers replaced of
few of the original girls on the list because although they had high grades,
they came from families that were better off.
To my chagrin, the very teacher who helped edit the list,
told they girls they were picked in part for their “social condition”. Next
year I’ll try to make sure the girl’s don’t hear that they were picked due in
part to their poverty level. This same teacher also took it upon himself to
tell some of the girls that they’d been eliminated from the pool of candidates
for the grand prize. The teacher’s have asked me to give all the students
scholarships. I said that in an ideal world, education would be free.
When girls are educated, they tend to marry later, have
fewer children, and more money is diverted towards families and communities. In
my scholarship program, we ask the girls if they will stay in school if they
get married. So far they’ve all said yes, but I feel like I’m putting them in a
position in which they feel obligated to lie. I’ve heard my principal say that
the school has lost 12-year-old children to marriage and one teacher said “they
all get pregnant while they are in school.”
Apart from the junior high, I’m
also working at the town clinic, “le poste de sante.” My counterparts are a
birth attendant and a midwife. My bet is that they are tired of delivering
babies, because they’ve told me a few times that they want to collaborate on
teaching women about birth control and the importance of birth spacing.
I also plan on working with men in
the future to.
I was biking in the bush the other
day about an hour from my town when I saw a man in a dress biking towards me.
Which is weirder: a Senegalese man seeing a white women in pants biking in the
middle of nowhere, or me seeing a Senegalese man biking in a dress? I will say
that it’s pretty common to see men wearing dresses here, as well as holding
hands and cuddling.
Child
Trafficking in Senegal and West Africa
If
you’re foreigner in Senegal, one of the first interactions you’ll have here is
with talibe. Usually they are boys around 6 to 12 years old, wearing dirty
ragged clothes and no shoes. They beg on the street for money, and go door to
door begging for food. For the most part, I see families giving these boys only
rice. The talibe system is one that exists in several West African countries.
Talibe are children trafficked under the guise of Koranic
education. They come poor Pulaar families or Guinea. This isn’t true for all
talibe, I have two talibe brothers and my father is wealthy enough to have four
wives. However, these boys are put onto the street for an average of seven
hours a day, every day, in almost every town in Senegal. They don’t keep the
money. They are housed in Islamic “schools”. To my knowledge their “education”
consists mainly of memorizing the Koran. Not all talibe are trafficked from
abroad or domestically, but the system meets every definition of slavery under
international law. Some fundamentalist and poor parents truly want their kids
to be in these schools. The justification is that begging for all of their
meals makes them humble, similar to some Buddhist monk communities.
Unfortunately, most people don’t know that these boys are habitually sexually
assaulted at their school dormitories.
I’ve only seen people be kind to
talibe. My two host families are very well to do, and they give food to the
boys every night. Again, this is another form of Senegalese generosity that
fascinated me at first.
Driving down to my permanent site
our cab stopped at a gas station. Several kids surrounded the car and two of
the kids came into the car with their hands outstretched. Talibe are not
aggressive most of the time. This passivity is actually a good sales technique.
When confronted by talibe you have a catch 22. Either you give them money,
which will go to their marabout, and thus enabling the system. Or you don’t
give them money, and potentially the child will go hungry and be beaten for not
meeting his daily quota, which I believe is 20 cents a day.
When the children surrounded the
car I felt claustrophobic. But after talking with Peace Corps vols about this,
I’ve come to see that these are just kids, victimized by a system that they
will only truly understand once (or if) they reach adulthood. So I started
sticking my tongue out of the kids and making funny faces. One kid started to
pretend hit me through the window and I pretended to be hurt. This got the
talibe to smile, even though we didn’t give them anything.
Here’s a good article on talibe:
One of the biggest arguments I’ve had here was during
training over the issue of child abuse. Our PC Senegalese staff explained that
they were hit when they were children and they continue to hit their children
today. Abuse towards children is something you see here all the time,
especially in schools and in homes. During the training session, I spoke up and
tried to explain that hitting children is a not OK. EVER. Regardless of
culture. Values are relative, but hitting children causes cyclical violence.
One of my host moms hits her two-year-old
incessantly (this woman also asks me for money every single day).
I’m a big fan of Geoffrey Canada, who created the Harlem Children’s Zone. He
states that when you hit a child for touching something, you’re hindering their
mental growth and creativity. Children touch things because that’s how they
learn.
I’m hesitant to put all of the
information about my experience on the Internet. Not all kids here get
trafficked or pregnant. Life does not suck. Senegalese people are far
friendlier than Westerners (I just got admonished by a stranger from another
village because I didn’t say hello to her while I was reading my book in front
of my house). People in all countries are trying to get by, and make their
lives as well as they can. That’s why I like this job (most of the time). I
want to make my life better, and everyone I work with tells me how they want to
make their lives better.
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