My Senegalese Story

"Humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won't enter into a story...The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen"
~Donald Miller from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Disclaimer: Beware of a very long blog post. If you want to avoid my philosophical musings just read the parts in bold and enjoy the pictures.

The quote above comes from a book that I read on the five hour bus ride to and from St. Louis, Senegal (the farthest Northwest you can get in Senegal and the old capital of Francophone West Africa). One of my study abroad mates, Emily, let me borrow the book after I had been going through a couple weeks of spending my days either dreaming about colorful fabric and beautiful Senegalese clothes, or about getting on the next South African airplane to the U.S. The book is about what it means to live a good story and the combination of it being in English and being really relevant meant that I devoured it and was enlightened.

You would think that flying across the ocean and settling onto another continent where everything is blatantly different would be enough of an "inciting incident" to give my life here a story. And while these last three months contain threads of stories, they are more like random anecdotes than anything else.

For example: "One day I woke up to a battle field of cockroaches who didn't have enough force to flip themselves back onto their legs and so an army of ants took advantage of their weakness and won the battle by eating them alive."

Or: "Instead of studying for my final Oral exam in Wolof I walked to the nearest stadium with my host cousin, Momo, and his friends in order to watch the soccer match between my family's home town, Mbour, and their rival team in the championship game. In the middle of the second half, with the score still 0-0, the power went out and the stadium went dark. Momo blamed the outage on a conniving rival team hoping for an excuse to regroup and I blamed it on the electricity monopoly Senelec, who schedules power outages around the city in order to save money. In the end our team lost and we went home."

Wolof class with our professor Sidy

I have encountered very few cultural adjustment difficulties in the time that I have been here, but you can't move to a new culture and not experience conflict, even though I thought I was immune. I criticized those who made themselves an American bubble and convinced myself that I was integrating. But I am especially talented in finding comfort bubbles too, mine just look different. I tell myself, I'm living in a new culture that I know nothing about, so instead of making myself vulnerable and allowing myself to make mistakes, I turn my life off. I became a hidden camera, my ears perked, my eyes peeled, my energy allotted to cultural analysis. I don't like conflict, I don't like to be wrong, and so I waited and watched, and mimicked others, following them in their shadows.

But then the "inciting incident" was written into my cultural story. When I was in Thiès over spring break, my wallet was stolen along with some money and my driver's license. I won't go into the details of the circumstances, but I will say that my stolen wallet finally launched me into a Senegalese Story. I found myself feeling exposed, identity-less, afraid, on the verge of tears, and homesick all at the same time. Beautiful fabric and flying home apparently became the images my mind conjured up in order to numb the discomfort agitating my soul.

Thankfully my passport was not stolen, but the absence of my wallet and my license got me thinking about what it means for me to communicate my identity to people here. It's not as easy as showing them my identity card to explain my existence. And the funny thing is I actually did that with some college students at Université Cheikh Anta Diop one time before my license was stolen. For people to know who I am here, conversation isn't even sufficient. I tried that too, but telling people here about who I am in the U.S. is impossible because life is so infused with cultural subtleties. In order for people to understand me and in order for me to understand them, we have to live together. We have to not be afraid to express ourselves, we have to share life's adventures, we have to go through things together, and still remember that we are both humans. That takes effort but it leads to adventure.

The more in Senegal I push against the river of my life that wants to flow in a certain direction, the harder the force of the river becomes. And if I am strong (or stubborn) enough to build myself a dam, that flowing river of life becomes a stagnant lake of limbo; until one day forces greater than mine caused a torrential downpour of circumstances. There I was soaking in the sun, enjoying my artificial lake that made my artificial life possible, when light turned to obscurity. Thief, lack of normal schedule, little sleep, a holiday far from home, and frustrations in explaining my identity were the drops of rain that overflowed my lake and broke my dam. I was trying to write my own story, and it was getting really boring; until the author of my life made it clear to me that the story I was living was not the story He was writing. My Senegalese Story was only going to get interesting if I took the courage to live in the culture instead of just observing it. I may not know how to live according to my Senegalese neighbors, but if I don’t even try living the way my culture has taught me, I will never learn the workings of another culture’s way of life.

So I got off the bus on the island of beautiful, historic, colonial-influenced St. Louis and was ready to live a new story.

This is how it went:

In between tourist attractions such as riding a horse cart around the island

playing traditional Senegalese instruments including the Kora and the Mellophone

watching Wolof skits

visiting a bird sanctuary

and paying way too much for way too little food, I sought out the St. Louisians.

First it was a stop at the local market, greetings in Wolof, staring at beautiful fabric (I truly am mesmerized), and attempting to bargain down the prices.

Despite my functional Wolof skills, the overly touristic St. Louis atmosphere posed a major barrier for a Toubab wishing to obtain a Senegalese price. I tried hard and spent twenty minutes with vendors asking them about themselves and about the fabrics, nodding knowingly even if the Wolof didn’t entirely make sense. I came away with a better understanding of who the vendor was, but the price of the fabric never lowered: on to the next shop in the market to repeat the process.

Finally, I came across 5 yards of beautiful Mauritanian cotton that was soft to the touch and the perfect pattern for a dress I had drawn earlier in the semester. I got the price down a little and seized the opportunity to buy it. Another walk around the market and I gathered up the courage to converse with the tailors who were busy sewing beautiful boubous for their Senegalese clients. I want to make a patchwork quilt with all of the colorful Wax and Cwep fabric that people wear here and in order for that to happen I needed to ask some tailors for their scraps. I struck a deal with a tall tailor who told me to call him the next day in order to give him time to assemble some scraps for me. Finally, I decided to bring my newly bought fabric and dress sketch to another tailor later the first night. Measurements were taken, the price discussed, and I was told to return the next night for my St. Louis souvenir.

The dress is a reminder of all of the adventures that can happen in one day if I spend the extra energy dwelling in uncomfortable places and push aside the fear of acting “aka toubabe” [like the quintessential Toubab tourist]. And to end the weekend, I wore it to my first Night Club and danced the night away until 3 am to a mixture of Senegalese mbalax, American hits, and the ever popular Romanian Nouma Nouma alongside and surrounded by St. Louisians.

Had I been the author of this story, none of this would have ever happened.