Mba da: A week on the Mauritanian boarder

From the window of the sept-place, I watched green baobabs scatter and disappear into the dust. I felt the assumptions about what I expected to do and see rattling around in my brain as we careened past everything I was familiar with in Senegal. During that long ride north, I began to understand that my stay in a rural village with a Peace Corps Volunteer would put to question much of what I thought I 'knew' about development work, education, and life in a village without running water and electricity. During my week in the St. Louis region of Senegal, I spent three days in a small village called Djiambo, and then took a vegetable truck to stay for three days at the Peace Corps regional house in Ndioum. In this paper I will reflect on some of my observations about education and life in the region I visited.   
 

Stretched out on a mat beneath a shade structure, I watched a young boy play with a beetle that he had leashed with a yo-yo string. It was 10am on a Tuesday. "Doesn't he have school?" Emily, our Peace Corps Volunteer, looked at the boy playing with the beetle with a pained expression. She explained that he should be in school, but his teacher did not show up for work today, and even when he did come to work, he spent a large portion of the day lounging and watching his students make attaya for him. Emily had spent a large amount of time convincing families in the community to send their children to school, but if the teachers don't show up for work, how could she argue effectively to parents that education was a good investment for their children? In Djiambo, not all families send their children to school, and of the children that attend school, not many reach high levels of education. For example, last year, only 20% of the children in the Djiambo school that took the exam at the end of their CM2 year passed their exam. I looked over to where Emily's thirteen year old host sister was cooking lunch with her mother. In the three days that I stayed in her family compound in Djiambo, she did not go to school. I thought of my host sister in Dakar who was going to a private school, who had a tutor come to the house twice a week, and whose parents checked her homework.   
 

I am not sure how to process this kind of disparity within a country, within a people. Even within the village there were jarring disparities. One older woman that was introduced to me had learned to read Pular from a Tostan class and now had a small business of managing the finances of several members of the community. In the next house over, an old man conducted classes underneath a shade structure. The students were bent over long thin tablets with wispy Arabic phrases. Emily explained that this was a dara, that the old man was known for beating his students and did not teach his students Arabic, only untranslated phrases of the Koran. I stared, more than a little amazed to see an institution that I had read about, a practice that we had discussed in class going on just a fence away from where I stood. Seeing the dara helped me to conceptualize what I thought about education. I value religious education- I spent several years in Catholic school and religious education. I believe that religious education is important for young people to feel connected not only to their faith, but to their heritage, their community. I do believe that this education, however, should not be done at the expense of an individual's ability to broaden their horizons and to interact with the world around them.
 

"Let me explain to you, you do not understand, this celebration is being done on school grounds, the mayor's office will be there. The language of the state, of the ministry, is French. We cannot address the invites in Pulaar." The teacher's remark stuck with me because of our discussion in class about the role of language in education and how indigenous languages interact with the French language in Senegal. Emily was organizing the party for the community in celebration of the girls from the school that had won a scholarship from the Peace Corps to continue their education. She had received help from the school, but quickly became frustrated as the celebration became not a celebration of the girl's hard work, but of the school. She hoped that addressing the attendees (would include the parents of the girls) in Pulaar would help to communicate the importance of education to the community. Unfortunately, she was met with nothing but pushback. Despite the fact that a scholarship winner performed a speech, and the presentation of the awards to the girls was a part of the program, I could not help but feel that the celebration was not exclusively for the girls, but a celebration for celebration's sake. Emily was doubtful that the real message of the celebration was communicated to the people who needed it most, in large part because the girls were honored by the mayor's office in French. Despite this, the celebration, while imperfect, was value added because it helped to show the community the value of girl's education through the use of theatre pieces and songs in Pulaar.  
 

The importance of education, and girl's education in particular, was very evident in the village. It manifested itself to me in the case of a young boy who had a large infected cut on his head. Despite the fact that the boy still seemed energetic, the gash looked dangerous and it pained him. When I first noticed the cut, I thought immediately of the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my backpack, and of the tubes of Neosporin and bandages that were always in the front pocket. I wanted to do something. But how did this cut become so badly infected? Had his family tried to treat it? I asked Emily about the boy and she explained that she had helped to pay for him to be taken to the doctor. His wound had been cleaned, and he had been prescribed antibiotics, but because the boy's mother had not taken care of the cut as it healed, it became re-infected. Emily was frustrated and implied that perhaps if the boy's mother had been to school, she may have been better able to take care of her son. This is a good example as to why educating girls benefits the entire community. Educated girls are educated mothers, who instead of succumbing to the fatalism that characterized Djiambo, have the power to change their lives, and the life of the community for the better.  
 

In conclusion, over the course of my visit to the north of Senegal, I gained some new insight on topics we have discussed in class such as education, traditional gender roles and disparities between urban and rural areas of Senegal. In addition to this, it took a week in another area to help me to realize how much I have adjusted to living in Dakar. As we drove south at the end of the week, I felt a sense of homecoming that made the trip that much more worthwhile.