Storyless

I just finished reading a book about “story”. It talked all about how stories are important and humans love stories more than anything else and we must place ourselves in a good story to have a good life. This was rather depressing for me since I’ve realized that I cannot tell good stories in French. My host family likes me well enough, but 90% of what they know about me comes from what I do, not what I say.

On top of that, all of my stories are rooted in my own culture. We all know that in stories, setting the context is the most important thing. Well, it’s practically impossible to do. And without knowing the context, and what my culture values, and how my cultures sees people, my family can’t grasp the real meaning of my stories. And I don’t get most of their stories either, to be honest.

The best form of stories is comedy. However, my sense of humor has been reduced almost exclusively to making fun of myself, which gets old after about a day. I only get to belly-laugh when I’m talking with my real family or my American friends here.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve given up, and my family here won’t really know me, and I will live as a semi-human here because I can’t communicate and participate in life fully. It feels like after 3 months that my family should know me and everything should be peachy-keen. But adjusting to living in another cultures takes a lifetime and is really never complete. So I have to stay humble, because my French is still bad, I still don’t wash my laundry very well, and I still am lost when it comes to Senegalese culture sometimes. And even if I did understand, parts of my stories and myself that are American could never be fulfilled here because they require the American context.

Stories are the way we connect to one another. Heck, all forms of communication and language were created because we live in this world with other people who we want to know and love and hug. So I am missing out, in a way, by not being able to story with my family here. But having a shared life together and shared experiences does make up for my muteness in some cases. My family knows that I like to eat, which is a good start. My personality comes out through my actions, as does theirs.

So we are building our own new story together. It’s a strange story that is usually awkward and sometimes has to be repeated many times to be understood, but it is still meaningful. It just doesn’t flow as naturally and the plot turns aren’t as obvious as they would be in a quality American film. But I’m trying to believe that my Senegalese story is still worth living in and participating in, even if I’m tongue-tied half the time and don’t feel like my American self.

Seventh in Seven

Traveling to Senegal is the seventh time that I’ve been abroad my life, and I went abroad for the first time seven years ago. I’ve had a pretty good average, I’d say, of going abroad once a year. This is also my third time in Africa.

It’s strange to travel with people who are going abroad for the first time or even to Africa for the first time. I developing, secretly, (not anymore) a theory about cross-cultural experiences and what people experience as they go abroad more or stay abroad longer. I’ve decided to make a list of changes I’ve seen in myself and in others who have more experience abroad.

Every time I go abroad I stay for a little bit longer- I was in Kenya 1 month, then Argentina 2, then Kenya again 3, and now Senegal for 4 or so. None of these trips are long-term, so this list would probably look very different if written by a seasoned ex-pat. In any case, I’ve just found the differences in myself interesting, so I thought I’d share.

1. Logistics- From frustration to expected challenge: Entering a new place and culture presents logistical challenges as much and perhaps more than it presents social challenges. A person has to relearn simple things that they never remember having to learn at home like finding a bathroom, using the phone, or buying groceries. At first, I’ve found that people react with anger or disbelief when they encounter these new realities. People find themselves saying that the way the new culture works is stupid or slow or inefficient. They blame the other rather than realizing that it’s just different. The more I travel the more I expect these challenges and take them as part of the experience as much as the cultural aspects. It’s even fun to wake up every day and look forward to the next logistical puzzle and experiential learning experience.
2. Unexpected- What?!? to leaving space for it: Making a schedule in another country is a funny thing. You can do it, but you never know what will pop up. Again, I’ve found reacting with anger or frustration doesn’t help the situation, while leaving room for delays or sidetracks and taking them as they come makes every day more enjoyable. Eventually you come to understand better what you can accomplish in one day with the resources available.
3. Planning- Every detail to on the fly: Speaking of unexpected, getting to know a culture makes you more able to figure out things as you go. I’ve often started off with grand plans gathered from the pages of my travel book. But the more I get my nose out of the book and watch the world around me, the more I learn from the people I get to know and get to experience things off the beaten track.
4. DIY to making friends: Every time I try to do things by myself at first in another country, I end up getting ripped off or taking all afternoon for a task that should take half an hour. The more I can learn from other people or follow them and learn from them as they do things, the better. I recommend ditching your “I can figure it out on my own” attitude as soon as possible and humbling yourself enough to ask for help. This hopefully, will lead to meaningful friendships and working relationships that will facilitate getting tasks done and learning about cultural differences.
5. Relationships- Excited and Shallow to Real and Slow: I was hesitant to put this on the list. But the truth is, I’ve experienced it first hand. There can be a lot of false-intimacy when you travel abroad. I’m talking about the “We are the World”, “You’re my brother/sister” stuff that is used a lot to evoke emotional responses but actually is only true once you’ve been through the fire of cross-cultural living. I’ve found that quickly made friendships don’t usually last, although sometimes they continue with a veneer of agreement at the cost of not learning anything from one another. The sooner you realize how different you are from one another, the better. This includes the difficulty of the economic disparities as well. Facing this reality is not fun, and can sometimes be isolating, but jumping over this hill allows one to engage in the hard work of building lasting relationships across cultures. This, I believe, requires a lot of self-awareness, humility, and patience, which can yield a great reward in the end.
6. Being proudly Non-American/Wherever-you-are-ian to Being Yourself, including American: My sophomore year of college I would say that I was half-Guatemalan, half-Kenyan, and half-Argentinean. When I abroad I would join people in bashing America. Eventually I realized that I will always be American, no matter what I do, and I actually like many things about America, despite its faults. I now try to walk the fine line of being myself, including my nationality and all of the history, good and bad, that comes with that. I believe that I’ve learned more in cross-cultural experiences when I know where I stand and then I can place the traditions, beliefs, and experiences of the people I meet in relation to that. Surely being abroad changes people and opens their eyes to new things. But if a person doesn’t know before leaving which beliefs they hold that will not change, they can become a punching bag in another culture. This gets at the point that when you travel, cross-cultural learning is a two way street. I am a representative of myself, my family, my university, my city, and my nation wherever I am in the world, and the people I interact with want to learn about me and America as much as I want to learn about them and their nation and culture. As the traveler, you are required to bow to the realities of your host culture more often and to put your interests to the side frequently in order to learn, and I recognize that this is essential. Yet, doing this does not have to equal demeaning yourself or your own culture. The more I travel, I find that I learn more and do better if I keep a good hold of who I am and where I come from, have my own pillow, and keep a few Clif-Bars with me. People have their own non-negotiables that should be examined and reflected upon when you travel, but not abandoned.
7. Theory-making to Question-making: My favorite pastime is listening to people who have been in a country for two weeks talk about how they would fix the healthcare system, the corruption problem, or the ubiquitous lack of coins (a real issue in Dakar, and Buenos Aires for that matter). In short, I’ve found that the solutions posed oversimplify the problems and rarely use local resources, including local expertise and labor. The best thing that I’ve found one can do with these issues is ask questions of people who are from the country in question, or who have been engaged with the problem for a significant amount of time. This may reveal some of the complexity that a visitor’s initial frustration hides.
8. Only in Insert-Country-or-Continent-Here to Bubble Bursting: I’ll finish with this. I’m tired of travelers making stereotypes from their experience of a place. Recently, I said I was tired and wanted to sleep all day and another student said “Oh, you’re becoming Senegalese!” Uh, no, and that’s offensive. The conversations I hear between some students here who have created their own Dakar-merica bubble are circular, whiny, and unproductive. Those conversations are similar in pattern to the international development blogs that I’m tired of reading. Talking about the same thing with the same people from your same culture over and over again every day leads nowhere. I try to ditch that for new adventures, or sometimes naps.

I’ll stop here for the sake of your free time and continue with these thoughts later on. Please post your thoughts and reactions to the items on this list- is your experience similar?

Immersion? An Analysis of Wifi Coverage, Hairstyles, Poverty and Globalization.

I’m having trouble being so connected. Trouble might not be the right word. I feel like I’ve never travelled and been so in touch with my family and friends at home. Why does this trip feel easier, maybe, less distant from home than the others?

In Dakar I spend the majority of each day at the West African Research Center, which has glorious Wifi (pronounced weefee en français). I was surprised to see the new(ish) laptop computer that my host family owns, in addition to an older desktop. And they have DSL internet in their home that they use almost daily to talk to their oldest son, who is studying in France, or multiple other relatives who live in Europe. This is a huge change from the talk of shipping in huge satellites to get slower-than-molasses connections in Kenya. Here people are connected. Gmail, skype, excel, internet-ready phones, they’ve got it and my family, a “middle-class” family, uses it all.

This raises several questions for me. The first being, how will I ever learn French if the World Wide Web in English is at my fingertips? So far, self-discipline is the only solution. It is difficult, however, to regimen oneself to the extent that I refuse to communicate in my “mother-tongue” with other American students. That’s almost impossible to prevent. And as a woman, it would be very hard to be a loner in this city and make friends on my own. So immersion feels elusive, despite being in another country. (Bubble in French is boule.)

Connectivity in Senegal has raised other questions for me about relative poverty, globalization, and the relation between the two. If we’re talking about relative poverty the best gauge I know of is observing mention women’s hair styles. Women in Dakar almost universally get their hair braided or have weaves, which displays an investment of time, money, and perhaps a relatively high value of aesthetics (but describing Senegalese fashion will have to wait for another post), or even the empowerment of women. In Kenya, all girls had very short hair. Only older women or richer women got their hair done. Even in Durham a lower percentage of black women had their hair done than in Dakar. So in that respect also, Dakar feels “richer” to me.

In 2007, Senegal was ranked 166 out of 182 countries on the human development index- in the group of the least developed countries. So why can I not see the poverty? How might the poverty here look different than that of the southern United States or a village in western Kenya? And, I must question my expectations as well, must immersion in Africa be immersion in poverty? Certainly not. Africa suffers from the problem of “poverty porn” in the United States, where the image of starving children is synonymous with the continent. Check out these other blogs for a discussion of this topic. I plan to continue learning about and reflecting on this subject.

The final issue that makes me feel, shall we say, less immersed than expected is the similarities between Dakar and the United States. There are far more similarities than I would have expected. Most of these are cultural phenomenon related to music, dress, food, and entertainment. But the question with globalization is whether it is a two way street. Yes, I’d argue, I’ve heard of Akon, who is a Senegalese rapper now popular in the United States. But I never knew he was Senegalese. The reach of the American media giants (YouTube, Google, but NOT Starbucks, MacDonald’s, or movie theatres) here is convenient for my comfort, but seems to my water down my experience of Senegalese culture. As a professor from Paris said in a lecture yesterday, the United States is dominant in all spheres except soccer. It also feels ironic that I am trying to become more Senegalese during my time here while many others are trying to become more “American”.

In short, my question is why doesn’t Senegal feel more drastically different than the U.S.? Is it my bubble in class with other American students and Wifi? Is it the constant comparison to my hut sans water and electricity in rural Kenya? Is it because Senegal is relatively rich and therefore I am comfortable? Or is it the invasion of American culture? Or just the uniformity of urban culture worldwide? Maybe I’ve begun to undervalue cross-cultural experiences, or am beginning to live like an experienced traveler. Or something else?

It’s hard to know, but it could all be because I’m in a bubble. Maybe Senegal is so different and I just don’t see it yet. I’m just hoping that I can shut up enough to appreciate Senegal for what it is, not what I make of it.

I apologize for the overuse of parenthetical statements in this post, but it was worth it to be able to use the word parenthetical. Twice.

My Ironic Christmas Gift

A watch.

Americans' concept of time is drastically different from the rest of the world's. In my time abroad and my interactions with others who work abroad it seems that every country has a time delay except the United States. This past summer I had to work on "Kenyan time". Soon enough I'll be learning the rhythm of life in Senegal.

I'm not sure that a watch will be the most useful instrument in Dakar. I'm not sure if my classes will even start on time. I'm actually at that point in preparing for a trip when you realize how little you can know about somewhere you've never been.

I hope that the watch will at least minimize the times I have to pull my Blackberry out of my pocket, displaying my wealth for everyone around. The watch is perhaps less American than the Blackberry. At least that's what I'm hoping.