A Glitch

May 21 on returning from work, it seemed that I would no longer be able to participate in the project in Senegal.

The process of reflection triggered by this email from Senegal  was worth the disappointment. Often I have found that when I choose to view what seem obstacles at first sight as opportunities for growth, growth is exactly what I do experience. So yesterday, I envisioned Not going to Senegal, not working with 10,000 Girls, and I saw that I would find other opportunities- that this dream, as important as it had been, did not contain the 'purpose' for my life.  I imagined myself doing other things this summer, finding other people to work with, and I knew I had the inner resources to take this turn in the road. I took an important step through the dream.

This cold Alberta spring morning, I am sitting in my 13th floor apartment at my laptop and I feel at peace. I feel  grounded.  I am going forward with my plans. I spoke with two of the women in the project and I feel closer having heard their voices.  My experience this summer seems more solid. I will go Insha Allah  and participate and learn.  I am sure to come  across the unexpected. I sure to meet many interesting people. 

I just reread my earlier posts.  Since the first one, I have reconnected with a former student from Montreal on Facebook. Moussa is from Senegal and it has been fun exchanging a few words in Wolof, French and English. 

--Loubess?  (Quoi de neuf? What's new?) - I texted him recently.

- Dara. (Rien de spécial. As usual.)  - He texted back.

I have exchanged a few words with my long-time friend, 'Vieux',  from Montreal and learned how to say Happy Birthday (dewenety)

Just recently I have begun teaching a new group at NorQuest College  and have had the pleasure of meeting Fatou. She is from The Gambia, Mandinka by ethnicity ... vivacious, positive and working very hard at improving her writing  and reading skills. She also speaks Wolof.

So ndanka ndanka... :-)  .Slowly Slowly... l'oiseau fait son lit.  (the bird makes its nest) 

American Grandmother Helps Educate Senegalese Girls

Timelessness

Now under 7 weeks until I leave for Senegal. I am still reading Maskalyk's book, Six Months in Sudan. So much resonates with me. Not because I think I will be experiencing the desert, an isolated post, dying or sick people but because his reflections and the very simplicity of his style trigger memories of my stay with Somali people in a small 'isolated' village, Wajir, Kenya. And because I am thinking ahead to the challenges and pleasures of Kaolack.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that a memory of mine was the 'simplicity' of living in Wajir, Kenya (and in Mangun, Nigeria). Yesterday while reading, I thought Maskalyk had captured better the essence of what I felt, by his explanation: fewer distractions. For him fewer distractions resulted in a sense of timelessness, of living in the stretched-out present.

most of us in the project have contracts for six months.  some are shorter, none are longer. though mine is only a couple months through, it feels like more. tim and i have decided on slogan for this project: “for those who think life is too short… come to abyei! it feels like it lasts forever!”

I think in some way, we all distract ourselves to avoid the true experience of time because it is uncomfortable…

i think some of the reason the time feels differently here is that there are few distractions. it was something I looked forward to when I read in the job profile: must have “interest to work in remote locations.” there is no morning paper to read while we eat our breakfast, after dinner, there are no concerts to go to , nor walks to go on. we sit quietly, and moments stretch. (pp. 170-171)

This sense of timelessness is what addicts must  crave: a couple of glasses of wine,  a refreshing drink of tequila and orange juice and  only the present exists. Past and future take their distance. I felt this divine sense of now sitting evenings cross-legged on a woven mat soft on the sand in Wajir where I  spent timeless evenings with Nick and Ian, two British VSO volunteers.  Quietness.  For two years we played UNO, and ate our suppers of camel goat, rice and onions under starlit cloudless skies. There was no morning paper that I remember, no shopping, only our short wave radios tuned to the BBC news.

I long sometimes for that sense of timelessness, of presence in the moment.

Here in Canada, I am constantly asked to consider RSP’s, pension plans, future employment advancements, new styles of clothing.  Propelled into the future. In some crazy way it seems appropriate to stress about work.  I often spend my now in the future, thinking about tomorrow’s lessons, problems at school, how to stay competitive.

I realize that Kaolack is a large city of more than 172, 305 people. It is situated at a busy port on the Saloum River. It has an important peanut processing industry, and I am convinced that Internet cafes and cell phones, and newspapers will be in plenitude. …though I do not remember seeing any newspaper in Dakar during my stay there with Ndoumbe Ndiaye 5 years ago.  But when I see the photos of Kolack, I see dusty or sandy streets, small kiosks, and I think there will be, for me, fewer distractions than here.

I remember how I felt when I lay my head down under my mosquito net in a tiny hostel with in indoor open to the night courtyard bar in Dakar five years ago in June.  I was overwhelmed with joy at being ‘home’. 

The effect of my three weeks in Dakar have stayed with me. Sometimes when I  tell someone of this mountain top experience, they ask me how long I was in Senegal.  When I answer that I lived there 3 weeks, I see in the person’s eyes a dismissal of my experience.  They have not understood that time measured in hours and minutes and weeks was irrelevant.

Shots

Three vaccinations today from an efficient, personable Capital Health Care nurse. photos of China on her walls. the Terracotta Army.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army). When I entered her office, she said I had 15 minutes but she gave me 50.  I came with data in French and in Spanish and with little understanding of what I had or did not have.I left with 3 vaccinations and a vaccination book that I can actually read, and a  treated mosquito net and insect repellent with DEET . all this came to just under 300.

Necessary? maybe not. When I went to Senegal in 2005, I got a whole slew of shots but they cost a lot less and I got them without deliberating as to what was necessary or  healthy .. I did all in the whirlwind initiated by my sudden decision to leave my Mexico posting for Dakar . I am not in the same place mentally as I was then. I feel more cautious.

I am reading, reading the journal /blog / book of the MSF doctor in Sudan, I feel peace; my desire to go is rooting itself deeply; I no longer am dreading the heat and unattractiveness of Kaolack - this is according to tourist guides. the people I will work with for a month live here. it is their home. maybe for all of their lives. and my memories of Northern Kenya have been revived: the heat, the burning sand, the cement-walled unadorned house I lived in, the sand burning the sides of my sandled feet, the rhythm of Somali music, cardamon tea, hot wind, quiet afternoons reading, mosquito net cocoon feeling of security,  napping in my friends' straw Somali-style home made from thorn bushes .. napping on woven mats on packed sand.. ah..

Few thoughts spent then on acquiring things, food ( onions and tomatoes and rice and goat/camel/beef bought recently cut were the menu of each day) ; no forms of entertainment besides tea and conversation and books and UNO. Simplicity. Not without struggles and choices and frictions but a slowed down, more focused existence. 


I would love to experience something of this again.

Preparations continuing

My list of what to bring along is made.

Last week I bought a book, Six Months in Sudan, and a quote at the beginning inspired me yesterday when I felt that this passion to be part of something larger than my life here in Canada might never be fulfilled.

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it , not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is do do and get it while you can and good luck at it."

--Joan Didion
Commencement address at University of California,
Riverside, California, 1975

In Maskalyk, James, Six Months in Sudan: a young doctor in a war-torn village, Anchor Canada, 2010.

This quote definitely struck a chord and makes up for the the relative expense of this project, and for leaving my mom for the summer, and for leaving the Rockies behind....

When I am bitten by the fear that this chance to learn a new way of seeing shall yet fall through; when I doubt what I have to offer, this quote comes as an invitation to take the chance.

Yet, I also keep in mind that 'one shouldn't think with certainty about the future' (Maskalyk, 2010).

Finally, I keep centered by the meditation : Step through the dream. Each passion is a step -- not the End. This experience I am focusing on will be succeeded by others. Still, it is important to 'live it'.