Bella notizia!

In un paio di settimane avremo un’altra stagista, Americana.  Lei sarà  lì per imparare Francese e Wolof poi, nella sua tempo libera, lavorarà con la nostra coordinatrice, Aminata Kouta.  Insieme cercherano a sviluppare una serie di  “causerie” o conversazione non-formale sui temi importanti:  prevenzione delle malattie, importanza di rimanere in scuola, e altri temi  per gli adolescenti e famiglie.  In Settembre scriveremo informazione sul importanza di non-formale educazione in Dakar e come questo tipo di educazione può aiutarci a raggiungere i nostri obbiettivi.

Village celebrations

Elena and I arrived in Senegal on May 14 and unfortunately we missed Chethana, our intern who had just left that morning.  She has done tremendous work for us but more importantly she has a special place in the hearts of those she’s met.  Her Senegalese “family” will never forget her, and even after a  week, Diko, just two years old was overheard telling other kids that Chethana was in her room sleeping.

Over the weekend we went off to Mbousnakh, the first village in Senegal we’ve come to love.  It was really exciting because all in one day there was a wedding celebration, a baptism, and a march to the cemetary to celebrate the end of a mourning period.  Every 100 meters or so on our walk to the cemetary the leaders who played the tom toms would stop and the crowd would form a circle around them leaving a space for anyone who wanted to dance.   When we arrived at the grave, which was only a slightly upraised rectangular  mound of dirt , the mourners started clapping their hands while others danced and sang to the constant beat of the tom toms.  Sweat glistened from everyone, it was 107.6°F!  It seemed that the closer family members danced in cirlces around the grave and tiny biscuits and leaves were sprinkled over the it. When they thought it was enough, the crowd slowly dispersed and people started heading back to the village to join in the other  ceremonies which were already in full swing.

The marriage actually took place two years ago, but the festivity celebrated the woman leaving her village and moving in with her husband who was now ready to live with her, in other words, the room was finally ready.  The preparation of the “bride” was an amazing event to watch.  It took over two hours with two hair dressers and make-up artists working non stop in deep concentration.  At the end, she seemed all fake. Senegalese women are very beautiful, naturally!   DJ’s with their fully equipped sound systems played  Senegalese music, raggae and other hits, one DJ was near the groom’s house and the  other in  a different area to celebrate the baptism.

Being made up is an important part of any ceremony for a woman.  The mother at the baptism was just a glamourous!

Di nuovo qui ….

Chethana, la nostra stagista, è partita la mattina prima che noi arrivassimo, non ci siamo incorciate per poco, mi è spiaciuto molto non poterla conoscere di persona, ha fatto davvero un buon lavoro qui. Quindi, dove eravamo rimasti…….

16 maggio 2o1o

Siamo arrivate a Dakar il 14 sera e, dopo il primo giorno di transizione, durante il quale abbiamo rivisto i nostri coordinatori Aminata e Pape e fatto con loro il punto della situazione (un conto è scriversi mail e un conto è parlarsi guardandosi in faccia…), la domenica 16 maggio siamo subito partiti per Mbousnakh, il nostro “primo amore”, per intenderci, il villaggio del mulino.

Domenica era un giorno speciale per Mbousnakh perchè hanno avuto luogo: un matrimonio, un funerale e un battesimo.

Il villaggio era in stato di agitazione, tanta gente che lavora in città è rientrata per la festa, c’erano i musicisti, i parenti e amici dello sposo e quelli della sposa, insomma, una giornata movimentata.

In realtà, ci hanno spiegato, i due “sposini” sono convolati a nozze già da due anni e hanno anche un figlio, ma solo in quel giorno la sposa si è trasferita, dal suo villaggio, a vivere nella casa della famiglia del marito……… forse è per questo che ha sorriso pochissimo, direi per niente, durante tutta la cerimonia???

E’ stato bellissimo assistere alla preparazione dell’acconciatura e trucco della sposa: per l’occasione sono state ingaggiate due parrucchiere/estetiste dalla vicina città di Thies. Una delle due ha cominciato a fare sulla nuca della sposa una treccia che a me sembrava bellissima, come acconciatura, ma in realtà era solo il punto di appoggio di una lunga coda di cavallo (rigorosamente finta) che poi ha dato origine ad una complicatissima acconciatura “a volte”   alta almeno 30 centimetri. Il trucco poi era spettacolare:  occhi alla Moira Orfei, ombretto colore arancione intenso, coordinato con l’abito (bubu) della sposa. Tutta la preparazione è durata circa tre ore….le donne Senegalesi sono decisamente più belle al naturale!

In un altra parte del villaggio c’è stato il funerale: anche qui, non si può parlare di un vero e proprio funerale perchè la persona era morta circa 1 mese prima ed era già stata seppellita, e in quel giorno si festeggiava la fine del lutto.

Il battesimo, invece, era …….. un vero battesimo…..

Nel prossimo post, la formazione delle donne al villaggio: lezione di matematica!!!!!

ciao a tutti.

Elena

the end

My time in Senegal has sadly come to an end–flying to Cairo tonight!

Thanks to everyone who has been following this blog!

All future updates/posts will be written by someone else~

Thank you/Merci/Djere Dieuf,

Chethana

thoughts

Apologies for the long absence. I didn’t want to be too repetitive with the blog entries, and have been waiting for something really juicy to come up. It now happens to be the last week I’ll be spending in Senegal, however (on to Egypt next!), and I’ve decided that it’s probably as good a time as any to put together some Big Things Learned from Living/Working in Senegal.

1. Effectively use local resources. Work with existing social/power structures–never around them. For projects with community-wide consequences/rewards, put management responsibility in the hands of communities, not individuals.

In theory, these things seem obvious and clichéd enough not to merit being placed on my list of top lessons learned, but. In practice, they are not obvious. It takes a while to realize that the only thing standing between the Dakar mayor waiving the informal-school-sector tuition fees of low-income girls could be a meeting with a well-connected social worker. And, the circumventing-of-existing-local-leadership can happen by accident. An NGO could give an average villager with little vocational training full responsibility for a project meant to produce income for the whole village, without realizing that this person is 1) not ready for such a responsibility and 2) is not the village head, and therefore is not the person villagers respect most or expect to lead this type of project. This reinforces the idea that foreigners are naive and willingly invest in projects without understanding the local way of doing things.

2. Do enough background social science research before investing money in community development work.

There’s still a divide between researchers (“intellectuals”) and practitioners in the field of international development. Development research is about more than producing statistics on what percentage of Senegalese live below the poverty line or don’t have electricity, and where. It also involves things like sending an organizational representative into a village for a week every two months, for example, to collect “human data” on the visible changes resulting from a women-focused community empowerment training paid for by the organization. Are relationships between men and women different as a result of the training? Are women able to encourage their children to go to school because of this training? This information helps target/focus the efforts of program officers—perhaps the community empowerment training doesn’t have the best model, for example. Perhaps one of the lessons in the training produced far fewer “visible” results than another lesson. With thorough research, and effective collaboration between researchers and practitioners, less money can be wasted, and maybe there could be more of an “equal” relationship between NGOs and their beneficiaries (the social science researchers might be better-positioned to spend time with the beneficiaries and humanize the perceived “donation”).

This brings me to my last point for the moment, which I’m going to disproportionately elaborate since it’s the most “different” and “challenging” aspect of my life here.

3. The unfortunate attitude that foreigners represent Endless Pots of Money Willingly Thrown Around, mixed with a peculiar idea that foreigners are foolish/not interested enough to track where exactly it is being spent… is more than unfortunate. It’s poisonous. It results in a terrible work environment, and seriously undermines possibilities of effective collaboration between two parties who should respect one another.

It’s a terrible thing when a group of people (whether they happen to be villagers or street children or school directors) collectively [semi-unconsciously] decides that it is impossible to achieve anything without the money of foreigners. I believe that it’s a bit shallow to look at this from a “well obviously this is the case, years of colonialism and economic exploitation couldn’t have produced anything else” perspective—that in itself doesn’t solve the problem of current individual and community-level psychological issues, and barriers to socioeconomic development, that result from holding this view.

On a related note, I think that it is pretty tricky to specifically work with children and families who beg for a living. On one hand, Senegalese beggars are faced with something between mild to unimaginable (for us étrangers, at least) life insecurities. From the perspective of an NGO worker, children coming from these backgrounds certainly “deserve” organizational attention/aid/money more than the stereotypical “coddled infant growing up in Beverly Hills” (to borrow the example of a friend who also works abroad) that many seem to imagine is the average American or Western child. On the other hand… these kids (and families, since the link between child-family is something that can’t really be forgotten) come with a lot of baggage.

Years of conditioning oneself to ask and ask and ask complete strangers for money can produce some troubling perceptions of reality. I’m no psychologist (I really do love writing about things I only half-understand), but here are a few examples:

1. Acceptance of dependence on the whims of others.

Begging doesn’t come across as the most sustainable career (these days, of course, what does constitute a sustainable career can be fuzzy), if for no reason other than the fact that it can’t be done without the donor following through on the direct action of handing over money. Although begging is generally viewed more favorably in Dakar/Senegal than in the US (and really is more “sustainable” here than there), it’s still not always a consistent source of income—which can occasionally be necessary. There are days when a beggar can earn relatively nothing, while other days produce fortunes. To get to my main point: I think the action of begging and placing responsibility totally and literally in the hands of others to fulfill the ongoing human need for food, clothing and shelter relates to scenes outside the workplace very easily. There seems to be a risk of losing a sense of “human agency,” or negating the capacity of a person to achieve anything without the help of others. Of course, to a large extent nothing anyone does can be achieved without the help of others. But to be so directly dependent might lead to an “us vs. them” mentality–a perception of a permanent glass wall between yourself and the rest of the world, or an artificially deep sense of inequality that only gets worse if you choose to believe in it.

2. Reluctance to pursue “gainful employment” or education, because the rewards of getting something for nothing are simply too great.

I’m biased; my personal opinion is that begging is not an honorable career. This view has nothing to do with me empathizing with the plight of people who currently beg for a living, or my active attempts to understand the social and psychological circumstances that have led to their current situation. It does, however, affect my belief that it should not be acceptable for a city like Dakar to produce so many beggars—particularly child beggars known as talibé. Positive action in the direction of reducing the number of beggars, like sponsoring kids from “begging families” to attend school, is contingent on these children believing that an education + the job/money rewards post-education actually represent a better option for them than begging. Unfortunately, this is sort of a tough sell in Dakar/Senegalese society. Why pursue an education when there are only enough “skilled” jobs for the top 5% (I’m making this percentage up), when by sitting with palm outstretched on the street corner, you can earn enough to pay rent? Years of discovering that begging can, despite its inconsistencies, turn a profit… can affect your “life philosophy.” You start to believe that in all circumstances, it’s easy (nothing to lose) and morally acceptable to ask anyone for money. But, to compare to the situation of oil-produced incomes and disparities in the Middle East—money unaccompanied by training/education isn’t going to do all that much for society-wide development.

3. Loss of perspective—seemingly willful disregard for the needs of others.

As I stated earlier, children and families who beg are often perceived as more deserving of attention and aid than “other people.” I’m not interested in discussing whether this is true or false. What’s more interesting to me is the total “blindness” it seems that beggars eventually develop in relation to the needs of the rest of the world. This can range from Mame Diarra’s grandmother insisting that it is Mame Diarra’s duty to skip school and lead her around the streets to beg (disregard of the kid’s “right to an education”), to various children unashamedly asking me to give them “lots of money” and whether they can use my cell phone credit even off-the-job, without considering the fact that I might want to spend this money on other things and people. As a beggar, every minute of the day serves as a humbling reminder of one’s poverty in relation to the wealth of others. It’s not surprising that over time, self and immediate family-focused views become more solid/rigid, and any belief in “public good” or “public service” fades away. Now, everyone’s selfish to a certain extent. I’m a selfish person—free to travel and pursue my own career interests, with no sense of obligation to provide for my family. But there’s a difference between pursuing your interests and forgetting that everyone else in the world has their own—and this is what I think begging leads to.

**So, ultimately, my point. I’m not trying to say that beggars (children, families) and people who continually ask foreigners for money represent a horrible segment of the population that should not benefit from/participate in socioeconomic development initiatives. I’m just saying that a prospective development worker should be aware of the complex tangle of psychological/social issues produced by years of unequal social relationships and distribution of wealth (which existed pre-colonialism, too). And, I think that it is important to realize that this “web of issues” creates something other than the traditionally perceived victim vs. exploiter relationship people think of when they think of Africa vs. The West. People who have suffered greatly and yet simultaneously exacerbated social and political disparities are not just victims. (Think Palestine, if that helps.) Understanding this has been very instructive for me, at least, in shifting my focus to creating mutually beneficial projects that take advantage of the resources—financial, intellectual, street-smarts, you name it—of all parties involved, rather than just the superficially privileged one.

the community vs. the public

Thursday, I was surprised to find that the health clinic where Aminata works doesn’t keep soap in the bathroom. When I complained about this to Aminata and the other nurse assigned to the vaccinations room, they offered me soap from some private stash in their cupboard. “No, no, I have my own soap too… don’t you think there should be soap in the bathroom, in general?” I asked. Aminata laughed and replied, “You want to go buy us some soap?”  …implying that the center was just too poor to afford soap.

I’m kind of skeptical that it costs that much to keep a couple of locally-made bars of soap lying around, especially when several of the health center’s offices have air conditioning units that run even when it’s not that hot yet (like now). It’s odd to see the standard for-good-health-wash-your-hands and steps-to-prevent-H1N1 signs in the halls, when there isn’t soap in the bathroom.

There are a couple of reasons this situation interests me: 1, it’s not like Senegalese households don’t have soap, or even, as in the case of the two nurses, that individual health workers don’t believe that it’s important to wash their hands with soap afterwards. It’s an issue of believing in the importance of providing soap to The Public. 2, this relates to other issues with working for the “public good” or respecting “public space” as well.

For example: as in many other developing countries, trash litters most of the streets in Dakar. Even Aminata will throw plastic containers out of taxi windows without feeling guilty about it. But at home, people never leave trash lying around. Rooms and bathrooms get cleaned every day, laundry is always washed on time…

I feel like this phenomenon is especially puzzling because Senegalese society (as I’ve experienced it) is very community-driven—even more so than Indian society, I’d say. In India, people definitely respect family opinion/”listen to their elders,” and follow other related stereotypical developing-country values. But in Senegal, some random child from a woman’s husband’s village—not a blood-relation—could suddenly start living with her, even if her own husband happened to be working in the United States (as is the case with Aminata’s sister Athia). It “takes a village to raise a child;” a two-year-old could be looked after by a combination of adults while the kid’s mother works semi-permanently in a city several hours away. Even strangers look out for one another. I—a foreigner—am living with a relatively random Senegalese family, and I get the impression that regardless of their financial circumstances or life insecurities, I could stay as long as I wanted. (Incidentally, Senegal is officially known as the land of teranga, or hospitality.)

…But this strong sense of having a stake in community welfare hasn’t automatically translated into an investment in what I’m going to call “public resources.” Few or no (I’ve gotten really vague responses on this) schools actively encourage volunteer programs along with whatever sports/artistic activities they might offer. People leave televisions and fans running if they don’t personally pay for electricity according to usage. Sewage constantly spews into the streets (Dakar’s well-known for its “open sewers”).

This relates to the way people perceive public office or government too: according to Aminata, before Senegal’s current president Abdoulaye Wade took office, people had no idea/interest in what a president was supposed to contribute to the country.

Now, I don’t doubt that this is changing even as I type, following the usual trickle-down trend of people copying the wealthy/educated according to their own changing wealth/education. Plenty of Senegalese are beginning to engage in political debate, and put their faith in things like the education system and “family planning” (the phrase people use to refer to contraception in general, not just the Catholic version). But that’s not the point—the point is that all of this seems to be taking place on a path that doesn’t overlap with the existing one.

I feel like there is still something missing in local development research + practice if such a rich tradition of community-focused living hasn’t made it incredibly easy to, say, leave soap in public restrooms. Some dots need to be connected.

everybody wants a piece

During the last “official” weeks of my internship here, one of the things I will be focusing on is organizing written information on the schools and children WFG works with. So, Friday afternoon, Aminata and I set off for a local elementary school several of “our kids” are enrolled in. Before we left, I wrote out my priorities: I wanted to collect information on the school director’s background, the percentage of students who passed their middle school entrance exams, general thoughts on the status of Senegal’s education system/most-pressing problems to be addressed in the future, and try to gauge how well Women for Girls is known as an organization to the school staff (organizational branding is pretty important in the US, so I figured, why not?). “Noooo… you can’t ask questions [about the last thing],” Aminata warned me. “You are not here for Women for Girls. It would be much better if you presented yourself as an American student who wants to learn about schools in Senegal.”

Why? Because the minute a school/any semi-organized local “group” finds out that foreigners are interested in helping them, the relationship quickly deteriorates into that of Relatively Poor Person/Place/Thing to Endless Pot of Money. At Adja Mame Yacine Diagne, another school where we work, a would-be fruitful discussion about how to get more kids to read/use the library turned into a discussion about how the library could really use some chairs and couches and a projector. Aminata worried that if Friday’s school found out that the six kids who magically had the funds to pay for their tuition and books weren’t getting money from a benevolent locally-based individual so much as an international NGO, she’d no longer be able to collaborate with the director to accomplish anything. “But can’t we just clarify that we don’t have that much money, and that we only have enough to cover their school fees?” She responded with something to the effect of, “they won’t believe us and you’ll just waste time you could be using to do research.”

So I became the friend of Aminata’s sister Athia’s husband (who currently lives in Detroit), here on a visit to learn about the Senegalese school system and culture before going back to university in the fall. Even with this cover story, the director dropped several hints about how he had to pay for a computer teacher out of his own pocket since the state wouldn’t cover it, and that maybe I could find a way to get them more resources? And so on. My half-joking responses about how I was too young to be of much use were brushed off (“Even Aminata is young, and look how much she is helping us!”).

…And it’s a funny, for lack of a better word. The director of that school is very intelligent, very experienced, and has achieved a very high pass rate for his students on the state exams. The fact that he’s a highly competent professional has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn’t hesitate to ask for money from a complete stranger several decades younger than him, who did not arrive with the stated purpose of donating money. The state simply doesn’t have the money and perhaps willpower to make sure that certain public resources exist/function, and a man like this school director has nothing to lose and everything to gain by throwing a wish-list at the feet of visiting foreigners.

In general, life here as of the year 2010 seems to be impossible without remittances/donations from abroad. I guess that observation fits somewhere in the beginning of a class called Africa 101… but it’s one of the most disconcerting things about living here. It still blows my mind to think about how someone making $10 an hour in the US earns more in a day’s work than Aminata earns in a month here as a nurse.

It’s still crazy to think about the fact that because of the internet, foreigners like me and Nathalie (French woman who works for another organization that sponsors children’s education in Dakar, and stays with Aminata when she visits) learned about issues and nonprofit initiatives in Senegal… but most people in Dakar don’t know how to use a computer. Aminata and I went to the airport last night to pick up Nathalie and her friend Francine, and I was struck by the fact that most of the people waiting at the airport for relatives and friends from abroad would never be able to afford a plane ticket themselves.

The technological “progress” of foreign countries means that Senegal is not cut off from the rest of the world—but the relationship is disturbingly unequal. In summary… I am only here because I have things that people here do not have.

gris-gris

This is probably a just punishment for writing something so smug and self-satisfied a few days ago about trust, BUT: my camera was stolen Sunday, during my first solo trip on public transportation. Sad and embarrassing.

On the plus side, I will no longer have to feel obligated to take and print out pictures for people (here, I usually feel self conscious about taking pictures in public, and when I actually take individual (instead of “street shot”) photos, it’s “understood” that I will find a way to print them out and deliver them… in some places, people are so used to foreigners having cameras that they themselves ask me to pull out my camera and take their picture even when I have no intention of doing so).

More interestingly (and less sarcastically), I want to use this opportunity to talk about gris-gris, or “talismans” tied or marked on people’s arms (usually) to increase their luck. There’s a lot of dialogue in Dakar/Senegal on the topic of gris-gris.

When I described the theft to Aminata and her brother Abou, after they were finished scolding me about how I don’t pay enough attention to my belongings (“You’re just like Athia (their older sister)… her husband bought her a $300 phone from the US and she just leaves it lying around”), the conversation inevitably turned to gris-gris.

“Even if you’re the kind of person who always pays attention to their stuff, sometimes this can happen,” Aminata conceded. “I was walking down Lamine Gueye [main street near our house] one day, and this man was carrying on a conversation with me. When I got home, my watch and bracelet were gone, and I realized it must have been that man who did it—and I didn’t feel a thing! You see how tight this bracelet is on me [demonstrates]. People like that have very strong gris-gris.”

Abou continued, “You could put your wallet deep inside your [zipped-up] pocket, like this [demonstrates], and they could slide their hand inside and take it out without you noticing at all. It’s because they have really strong gris-gris… you could even get on the Ndiaga Ndiaye knowing that you might be robbed and pay even closer attention to your stuff, but if someone has really strong gris-gris [you’re basically doomed].”

“Some people have gris-gris in their mouths,” Aminata added. “They’ll try to pick you up off the street [by offering you a ride], the way that white person tried to the night we were walking to the club. And you’ll be the type of person who is very careful, and never accepts [rides like that]… but because they have gris-gris in their mouths, you find yourself agreeing, anyway.”

Me, fascinated: “Has that ever happened to you?”

Aminata: “No, but I can’t tell you how many girls have been lost that way.”

In a separate conversation, Aminata & Co. also blamed gris-gris for Yekini’s victory over Tyson during the April 4^th lutte match. “He [Yekini] doesn’t have better technique/skills than Tyson… he just has really powerful gris-gris.” (The gris-gris, even in this case, is actually physical. Lutteurs tie and mark gris-gris on their arms, and chew it in their mouths before a match.)

photo from the March 21 lutte match

Is gris-gris just a product of a socioeconomic situation where people don’t feel that they have enough control over their lives, and displace “blame” and power to external objects—the way I described witchcraft and ritual murder in a [pretty bad] Anthropology paper I wrote during undergrad? Or is there something to it, after all? Fun thoughts for a Tuesday morning ~

trust

From the minute I arrived in Senegal, I’ve been warned by various people that Dakar is full of robbers, that it’s dangerous to go out at night (especially for toubabs like me), or, at the very least, that I can’t possibly go shopping by myself without getting ripped off by unscrupulous vendors (again, mostly because I’m a toubab).

Accordingly, well-meaning people everywhere have been horrified by my open purse (doesn’t it have a zipper??) and careless attitude.

After chatting with a man at the mall where I use internet for twenty minutes, I left my laptop computer with him while I went to the bathroom. When I returned, he gave me a stern lecture about how not all Senegalese men were as honest as he was, and that I shouldn’t have trusted a complete stranger. Incidents like that make me laugh for a couple of reasons: One, because everyone assumes that the Westerner has poor judgment and trusts dishonest people. Two, because everyone believes that they (specific Senegalese person/people) are exceptional, and that the average Senegalese person couldn’t resist the temptation of capitalizing on some poor Westerner’s stupidity. I actually have this idea that it would be much-more-often-than-not unthinkable to reward someone’s trust by making off with an object of clear value the minute their back is turned.

…The way I see it, there’s a choice to be made. Society can only function if people trust each other, and actually take the time to judge character on a case-by-case basis. By being so suspicious that anyone who calls out to me on the street is a potential rapist, that each initial price quoted to me is always falsely high, and that the man who offers to take my picture at the Mamelles lighthouse is obviously going to ask for money in exchange… I think I lose something.

Naturally, there is no reason to assume that everyone in Dakar is wholesome and friendly, or pretend that there aren’t people out there who have no problem cheating foreigners. But there’s a difference between bargaining and being cautious vs. constantly feeling attacked. Dakar is not an attack.

Sometimes, it helps put things into perspective to remember that the anonymous man who could cheat me out of 150 CFA for a vegetable purchase is the same man I have to trust to start passing the same amount four rows back on a Ndiaga Ndiaye to pay the conductor.

luck and money

Yesterday, my puce (unfortunate little word that resembles too closely, in my opinion, the French word for whore, pute. Actually means SIM card.) abruptly stopped working. During the five minutes it took Aminata and I to figure out the source of the problem (the phone? The battery? The puce?), my emotions shifted from curiosity/confusion to irritation/rage.

“Well, you’ll just have to buy another one. This happened to me three times,” Aminata said calmly.

Me: “Can’t I take it to the store where you got it and ask them to exchange it for free?”

Aminata: *laughs* “Chethana, I got it for you off the street [they don’t do “warranties”]… in a store it would cost maybe 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 CFA ($20-$40), but you only had to pay 5,000 for it from the street vendor… I mean, it’s not going to be a problem for you to buy another one, right?”

Me: “It’s not the MONEY, it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing. They have to take responsibility for it!”

A part of me wants to be rebellious and resist buying a new SIM card—how dare the system cheat me?? In actuality, this situation is costing me more like $30 since I just put $20 of talk-time into my phone, something I expected to last me another month. So, I suppose that it kind of is about the money.

…But these things happen, when you live a life dependent on luck or chance.

Exhibit B: Prisons and bribery

Two days ago, Aminata and I were supposed to have a meeting with a social worker assigned to the women’s prison in Grand Yoff.

Hasn’t happened yet.

When we went to the prison and started “interviewing” the man we believed was the director of the women’s prison, we found out that we were in fact not in the women’s prison. That explained the lack of female staff, perhaps… And the director of the women’s prison was gone for the day. Incidentally (will be relevant in a couple of sentences), the male director was extremely cooperative and friendly. He set up an appointment between us and the female director, who he said would be able to answer our questions.

When we returned the next day (yesterday) to meet the actual director of the women’s prison, she very severely told us that the kinds of questions I had (What types of felonies had the women committed? What’s the procedure or working with them as a social worker? Has the prison collaborated with anyone to reduce the rate of female incarceration?) couldn’t be answered without official authorization from the director of penitentiary administration. I was apparently asking for “classified information.” Um, okay, so why didn’t yesterday’s director tell us that, and save us the time and money of traveling there uselessly for the second time?

So I wrote the required “letter of introduction,” which I’ll have to present to the director of the penitentiary today, and in turn present this to the director of the female prison.

Even after this, there’s no guarantee that she or the social worker will give me good answers.

(For those of you who are probably thinking I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy to get information about a prison—the problem here, of course, is that the process of getting said information is a mystery to a certain extent. Some people have it easier than others for no apparent reason.)

In this situation, many Senegalese go for the “petite enveloppe.” Or perhaps a “grande enveloppe,” depending on the seriousness of the request… this is otherwise known as a bribe. Basically, to balance out the elements of chance/luck that are involved with various daily activities/research (in my case), one can hand off 15,000-30,000 CFA ($30 to $60) to the right person. Now, this is not something I or Women for Girls is prepared to do. We’d like to think that bad luck is no match for a nonprofit that genuinely wants to help people.

…I’m curious to see how this turns out.

Exhibit C: Housing

This one’s a rather sad example.

Aminata’s family’s housing situation is going to blow up at some point in the future… within the next month. Or two months. Or five. Actually, we have no idea.

To make a long story short, the “apartment” complex where she lives has been revalued to the same amount as a house recently purchased by the family of Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade. It makes absolutely no sense at all, especially given the current state of the building. Until now, her family only paid rent for part of the “apartment.” Now, the owner wants to sell, and when he finds a buyer, the family may have to return to their “native village” (which Aminata and most of her siblings have never seen, since they were born and raised in Dakar) close to the border of Mali because housing within their budget no longer exists in Dakar. Aminata may not be able to work at all, let alone as a nurse. Her sisters may not finish middle school, let alone high school.

Bad luck and no money turns out to be an unhappy combination.