Experiences

The experiences happen too fast to even process them. Life here in Senegal is a continuous lesson. There’s no denying that I love to learn, and therein may lie the blessing and the curse. I have such a hard time reducing encounters to vignettes. Every story needs to be processed and told; but again, life doesn’t grant us the luxury of endless time. So much is temporal, and the force lies within the moment, not necessarily afterwards during the reflection.
So, I am both invigorated and exhausted. Does the student who never takes a break really learn?? Everyday I listen to world news in French as I prepare my coffee and breakfast. Paying close attention to what is said and how it is said, before I even interact with anyone else for the day. Greeting the guards in Wolof, trying to understand the new utterance they seem to throw at me every day, in a language whose sounds have proven to be so challenging to internalize. Then there’s the nonverbal communication that might come in the form of a guttural click, a slight groan, a hand on the heart or on the forehead. There’s the expressions and the delivery style. There are topics, as a westerner with financial means and life experiences, that have no meaning if shared with many of the locals. I had to be equally entertained and frustrated the other night when one of my colleagues who is in her early sixties was talking to a group of young Senegalese men in their twenties about Tchiakovsky’s 1812 Overture and Ravel’s Bolero, and how difficult the violin and clarinet pieces are to play. Imagine a group of black men being lectured by an elderly white woman about classical music in the U.S.? Even that image is out of the ordinary. Now imagine that lady gesticulating and miming actions with great passion in front of men who don’t have running water in their dwellings and most likely have never seen ANY musical instrument other than drums?! And she comments that of course these are pieces that EVERYONE knows!

Everyday I get to play teacher to her and other colleagues while trying to learn myself. It is amazing how little we know and how much there is to know. This fact is exciting, yet demanding. So Senegal continues to teach me so much. There is so much I want to share in a certain moment, and then I have another amazing, eye-opening experience. I play teacher and student from sunrise to sunset. I am being changed in ways unbeknownst to me. The sensory deluge is in such contrast to my recollections of daily life back home. What follows then, may be a full recounting or a vignette; I will let my fingers decide.