The End of a Decade & The Sum of “Weird”

Shh. Listen. Quiet. If you stop just long enough you can hear the ticking of the clock, counting down to the end of a decade. It seems fitting, then, that my third (and most likely last) study abroad experience marks the end of it. 

Climbing a Baobab

Ten years ago, I was twelve years old and had just found out I was transferring schools and moving to the other side of San Jose, thirty minutes away. It had seemed like a world away at the time. Today, I’m preparing to enter the working world, and move into a new home with new roommates in DC. I wonder if ten years from now I’ll be moving too. 

I returned from Senegal a few days before Thanksgiving, and have spent the time since then with my extended family in Philly, then good friends in DC, and finally back home in California. My last blog post, in the meantime, was pushed on the back burner. And there it continued to sit, as I thought about my time in Senegal and Florida, and what it meant to me. 

Before I left, people told me I was lucky. They told me they were jealous. They told me I was bad ass. They told me they could never do what I was doing. They asked me where Senegal is. 

They still ask me where Senegal is. 

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A few days before leaving Senegal, I felt myself growing nervous. What would people ask me about it? How could I describe my jumble of an experience in a 5 minute –– no, 2 minute passing conversation with a casual acquaintance? With people who have never left the country? Never travelled to the African continent? I remembered the dread I felt after Morocco, as I was again and again asked the same two questions: 

1) Did you like France or Morocco better? 

2) Did you have to wear the veil?

And so, I braced myself for the questions I was sure would come about Senegal, and which I would have no good way to answer. But if anything, I found an absence of questions. It was as if Morocco was just foreign enough for people's stereotypes and wanting to know if they were true, while Senegal was so foreign most people didn’t even have stereotypes to inquire about. In a way, it’s been a relief. 

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Mague adding details to the portrait I 

drew of her. Mague's mom drew the 

portrait on the right (of Nogaye), and 

insisted I do one of Mague.  

In early November and jotting a brief outline, I had titled this post “Returning Home: Reflections, Hopes, and Disappointments.” But that doesn’t feel quite accurate anymore. It’s too clean. Too cliché. Too facile. An open and shut case. 

Over the course of my program, I found myself increasingly at ease with Senegal, but frustrated with the program itself. I couldn’t stand a professor with whom I had to spend 10 hours a week. I disliked the superficiality of our excursions. I tired of the insubstantiality that the program exuded: there were no built-in reflection exercises: no discussion of what it meant to be an American – with all the privilege that accompanied the title – in an African country. 

We were constantly hearing each other’s opinions on topics we were not educated about. Yet we never truly engaged in dialogue. 

I suppose I’m biased. I spent my senior year of college dedicated to an intergroup dialogue on nationality and immigration, an alternative break that championed the role of dialogue in peacemaking, and activities aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion through guided reflection. For a year, I centered meaningful dialogue and reflection as a core part of my life and identity.

It wasn’t until the end of this program that I realized how much the absence of that mindfulness felt like a slap in the face. 

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Over the four months, I found myself increasingly drawn to meditation apps on my phone, intense journaling, and conversations with trusted friends on the program to cope with what I considered a serious lapse. I was fighting a profound sense of disillusionment. 

I was disillusioned with the absence of reflection, but also with the actual French courses. I realized I’d most likely never use Wolof again and that, though I could hold a basic conversation, I’d quickly lose the skill. I realized learning to make a traditional Senegalese dish is harder than I thought, and that I ran up against the same problem I had in Morocco: the words my family knew for spices were local words, and not ones I had any way of knowing. And making a Senegalese friend reaches its own impasses in a place where female, foreign students are known for marrying local men, rendering you a commodity more than anything else. 

Babacar! My host brother/nephew. He 

would try so hard to impress me with 

his "yoga poses"

But I was also lucky enough to grow extremely close with my host family. Nogaye and Mague dragged my suitcase and backpack to the bus on my final day, promising me that we would see each other again. My host mom, certain that I would come back in a few years with “a husband and two sons,” said she would pray for me in my job search and (assumed) husband search. My host brother, for his part, pointed out that only the job part was important and “who cares about a husband.” I appreciated how surprisingly liberal my family was at times by Senegalese standards. After all, who cares about a husband!

Thanks in no small part to my amazing Country Analysis professor, I developed a good understanding of Islam in Senegal and the larger region. My greatest wish, to feel uncomfortable, was also more than fulfilled. I felt uncomfortable in the heat, in the sickness, in cultural confusion, in a foreign language, and in navigating a new space. 

The last, best, and perhaps most unexpected surprise were the relationships with my fellow program participants. We were a random jumble of people brought together, all with differing reasons for why we were there. They kept me sane through the insanity, were there when I needed a good cry, shared laughs about silly things we both knew no one else would find the humor in, and had me making promises to visit places like South Dakota. 

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Diane & I - a DC friend I made on the program 

It would have been easy to fill this post with plain resentment, or platitudes about the value of difficult times, or saccharine trivialities about how it’s all okay because I found friends. It’s easy to fall into the mental trap of making just one of those things the narrative of this experience. But I didn’t want to do that. These last six months deserved more than that, and I wanted to do them justice. 

There were times when I felt exhilarated and deeply fulfilled, like one long breath out. Wow, so this is life. And there were times I wanted to close my eyes and melt away, disappear for the day. This semester was complex, and messy, and hard, and rewarding, and I don’t think it will ever, truly feel “done.” 

I think about the next turn of the decade, and I imagine I’ll think back on this period in my life as just a weird, strange time. Because it’s ineffable, and “weird” feels like the only way to explain it, however imperfect a descriptor it is. 

The last sunset I saw in Senegal