The Summer Exodus
Dabo is not a summer destination. Maybe it should be, but upon the close of school, students flee home for vacation. Unlike the United States, many students live too far from higher education to travel from home. Instead, they find relatives/family friends/strangers to live with, even though it may just be eight miles from home.
Eight miles may not seem much in America, but here it is a vast chasm. If you don’t live on or near the road, you would have to walk, bike or hire a donkey cart to take you that distance. As you may imagine, eight miles quickly becomes too far to travel on a daily basis.
At the busiest of times, seven people live in my compound, which consists of five huts. For America, this might seem crowded, but in Senegal, it is absolutely expansive. Most compounds of our size feature at least twenty people. My family during language training featured somewhere between 40 and 45 people living in one building, dispersed among seven or eight bedrooms. One volunteer lives in a massive compound of over 100 people.
While many volunteers lack for peace and quiet, I am rarely bothered. I am left to my devices, engaging with my family and the community on my own terms. I spend a lot of time with the people in my compound, but I never am forced to. Needless to say, this is wonderful. I am often told by others that they cannot have a minute to themselves. This is not my problem.
The problem becomes when summer arrives. Of the seven people who live at times in my compound, two are students. They are gone until October at the earliest. The remaining five includes my host uncle, who is blind and does not leave his room, in addition to only living here part-time. That leaves four, but that number contains my host sister/work counterpart, who bolts for the big city of Thiès each year in early July to see her husband and children. Though I don’t blame her, she will not return until November.
Who remains? Well besides me, there is my host mother, who is a lovely woman probably about 60 years of age, but not the world’s greatest conversationalist. The other person, my 6-year old nephew, who while entertaining, doesn’t really supply any adult companionship. Essentially, the tumbleweed rolls through my house right about now.
This isn’t the worst of things. I plan on taking the GRE when I vacation in America in August, and this gives me plenty of time to study. I can take practice tests to my heart’s content without worrying about neglecting the people I live with, or them arriving and interrupting me. It also gives me time to watch television on my laptop secretly in my hut without feeling guilty (I know, tough life).
In the past week, I finished up home visits for the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship Program. A home visit is exactly what it sounds like: you visit the family to see their level of support for their daughter’s education as well as to accurately understand their economic state. Doing my last visit in Dabo, the father offered me his daughter, which unfortunately is exactly the attitude we are trying to combat with this program. There’s still time for him to learn.
Before I go, I’ll leave you with a strange story from a little while back. I was speaking with one of the students at the high school in Dabo, and he informed me that the United States never landed on the moon. “They fabricated it,” he said. Wondering where he managed to track down this conspiracy theory, I asked him where he had heard this. “My teacher,” he replied.
