Epilogue

I get anonymous stats on the search terms people used to end up at my site.  Some of the best:

diagram for bunk bed [This person actually came here twice.]
senegalese pudding
senegal tax rates 2009
gambian lady
banjul lady [I'm sure these people found those exact ladies.]
milk powder in gambia

But despite the odd ways a few people made it here (and thank you to my friend and co-participant Vu for the idea to post these), it seems there was a good amount of actual interest in what I was doing these past five months.  So I very much appreciate the fact that you took time out of your busy schedules to follow along.  But I think that perhaps more than being a compliment to me or my writing, what this interest told me was that independent of me, what I was doing was pretty, well, interesting.

But I’ve been taking a look back at my 2000-odd pictures from this semester — and I’ll get some more of those up on my site sooner or later — and the overwhelming thought I’ve been having is not, “Wow, this is pretty interesting,” but rather, “Wow, I did a lot of crap over the past five months.”  Not bad crap — just a ton of stuff.  Being there definitely affected me in ways enumerated in this post, but I have no oversimplified conclusions to give about my time in Senegal.  Am I happy I did it?  Certainly.  But I’m also happy to be back home, speaking my first language in an entirely familiar culture.  I feel like the other students and I accustomed ourselves to a new way of life, and although it would be impossible to fully and entirely integrate into that life, I think we did pretty well given the constraints.  So I’ll miss the other American students and the Senegalese students I got very close to, but five months did seem long enough and I’m ready to get back to college.

To recap the past few weeks, I had a great time with my family both in Senegal and in South Africa.  My mom and I went down to Kedougou, a town in the southeast of Senegal close to the border with Guinea, hiking to some cool waterfalls and visiting an independent Bedick village on the top of a mountain.  Then my dad and brother joined us the next weekend, and we had a fairly rough time fending off thieves and hustlers (successfully) but also got to a great traditional wrestling match and had a nice visit with my host family.  It was great to have them there but also a little odd to spend time with them in the way that I did; I had come to think of the lack of some basic comforts as a structural constraint on my life there, but as soon as the family showed up and was willing to spend a little more money, those amenities became available to me.  Senegal had become the land of lack-of-hot-water for me, and all of a sudden I had hot water, and so on.  I don’t think this is bad — I always hate when people complain that their experience in a developing country is somewhat ruined by something like relatively constant internet access, since people in Senegal should have internet just as much as we should — but it was just a little weird to me given how I had become accustomed to living there.

Anyway, after a busy last weekend, we headed down to South Africa.  I spent nine hours on a plane next to a man taking up half my seat and reading a Glenn Beck book, then two days in Cape Town, two days in Stellenbosch (the wine country right outside Cape Town), and three days at a safari camp north of Johannesburg.  I recommend it all (except my neighbor on the flight).  Cape Town is beautiful, and was like Disney World after being in Senegal for so long.  So I’ll try to get back there at some point soon.  And I had never really considered going on a safari before, but I don’t see how you couldn’t like seeing those animals up close.

And now, as of 6 am Wednesday, I’m back home.  I’ve never really understood the phenomenon of culture shock, so no big problems readjusting, but whatever odd feelings I would have about being home have been somewhat tempered by already having been in a more developed country for the past 10 days.  Our program leaders told us before we left that all we would want to talk about on arrival would be our time in Senegal, but that we should be forgiving to people who don’t have unending interest in what they may see as a somewhat bizarre abroad program.  But I’ve actually had the opposite experience; I’ve mostly wanted to hear what others have been doing, but most have been unwilling to leave the subject of Senegal.  But I can’t complain too much about having to talk about myself extensively, and I’ve appreciated all the interest.

With that I think I’ll come to a close.  Some have suggested that I should continue posting here even though I’m back from abroad, but I have no plans to do so;  I don’t think my economics problem sets are quite as exciting writing material as killing a sheep.  But who knows, maybe that’ll change.  Again, I’d like to thank you for following along.  It’s been great to interact with people through this medium, and I never thought people would continue to follow along throughout the long five-month period.  I hope to see you in person soon, and best wishes to all for a happy new year.

-Eben

The almost-final countdown

I take back most of everything I said about the Dakar-is-like-DC crowd.  I left my house on Friday morning, lugging my bags across sand roads until I saw a horse-taxi that I hailed down to take me to a random point on the side of the road where buses stop.  My trip to Dakar went as indicated in my last post, and my taxi drove me through Dakar in a state of near-shock given the various transformations of places I was familiar with.  The hole in the center of the traffic circle near my house?  Now filled with a nearly-finished fountain.  The houses under construction in my neighborhood?  Done.  The rubble on my block?  Gone.  I walked into my house, and along with a warm welcome from the entire family (especially the kids), I was greeted by a new desktop computer, internet, and cable TV.  Mère Vitou’s explanation for the rapid construction was that no one builds anything during the rainy season, which it was during most of my time in Dakar, but since that’s over everything has picked up.  (This doesn’t explain the new stuff in my house, though, which she said they bought on credit.)  My next question was whether the TV was new, since compared to what we had in Mekhe it may as well have been a Fahrenheit 451-style full room deal.  It was not.  But to get back to my first statement, the way of life in such a big city filled with generally modern amenities makes me much more wont to make the DC-Dakar comparison after six weeks in a town of sand.

Anyway, I continued on to Kaolack that night for the wedding, with the car breaking down 3/4 of way through the trip after having been turned off at a customs checkpoint.  (Situation resolved when two other passengers and I pushed the car for 50 yards to get it to start.)  The groom, Francois, showed up at his brother Charles’s house at 12:30 am the night before the wedding with a small suitcase, not having eaten all day.  The next morning, I figured that standard Senegalese wedding attire was bare top with towel, since that was Francois’ garb until 45 minutes after the wedding was supposed to have started.  (Those craazy cultural differences acting up again!!) But everyone eventually ironed and put on their suits, and we got to the mayor’s office for the civil ceremony at about 11:30 for the 10:00 wedding.  With everyone seated inside the small front office area, the mayor made Francois and the bride sign some papers, then gave a speech in Wolof about the duties of marriage.  The party quickly started, first at the bride’s family’s house in Kaolack, then at Francois’ family’s house in Sokone after a jam-packed wedding party bus ride an hour south.  Other than the palm wine (the families are Catholic and can thus drink) and periodic breakouts of frenetic dancing, the party wasn’t anything terribly new for me but was still fun.  By Sunday afternoon everyone was exhausted, and I was ready to head back to my newly luxurious house in Dakar.  So we took the seven hour trip back in two sept-places, the first of which broke down twice but was repaired relatively quickly both times.  (One day I swear I’ll wake up and all the rubber bands and scrap metal holding this country together will have collapsed at the same time, leaving Senegal broken.  At what point were these cars new?)

So here I am in Dakar, writing for what will likely be the last time before heading home.  My program ends this Friday afternoon where it started, at Honorine’s house.  (She’s one of my host mothers and lives separately from the family, as you may remember, and she has ties to MSID from having been the housing placement person back in the day.)  This week has been spent in short classes recapping our internship experiences, and then the rest of the group heads back to the States on Saturday night after an odd week of feelings about leaving the country being conflated with feelings about separating from people who we’re just catching up with again.  It’s been different for me, though, as I’m staying on for my mother’s arrival on Saturday, like I mentioned, and then my father and brother’s arrival the next weekend before heading down to South Africa for a week or so.  We all head home December 29.

Moving backward, my last week in Mekhe passed without either a hitch or anything remarkable.  And at work, I finished up my report to give to both my supervisor and to my program director, Waly, as our final assignment.  The original French version is here, and I won’t translate 25 pages into English, but Google will, so here‘s a translation (rife with incomprehensible renderings of the original).  You should know, though, that this paper is what’s wrong with what passes as research.  First, the tiny sample of 21 participants was comically far from randomly selected.  The credit agent, Diadji, picked most of the participants, which meant he was usually friendly with them from having taken out multiple loans.  This made the average participant more successful than the average client.  Then, most of my interviews took place in and around Mekhe, making the nature of the participants’ work different from those who live in more rural areas and also likely making them more wealthy.  Secondly, it was likely impossible to get a straight response out of the clients; they knew I was affiliated with FDEA, and sometimes Diadji would even have to translate for me, and so they likely fed me answers from time to time so as not to alienate FDEA.  Next, most clients partake in absolutely no rigorous financial accounting, so their responses to many of my questions about their financial situation likely rested on nothing more than quick heuristics.  And finally, given my audience, my analyses go no further than simply calculating percentages.  No statistical hypothesis testing, no graphs, nothing.  But with all that said (is that all?), I still found it all pretty cool. So here are some basic results, for those too lazy to click through to the PDF itself:

• Two-thirds of respondents report an increase in income and/or spending on expenses.
• Among the 40% who had problems giving their families enough to eat before starting with FDEA, about 60% no longer have any of those problems.
• About four-fifths of respondents worry about indebtedness, and half of them have actually had at least one problem in paying on time.
• 85% say the benefits from the loans are greater than its downsides.
• Half of women say the loans have given them more authority at home.
• A little less than half volunteer that they’re happy to have the loans regardless of monetary benefits because they give them a chance to work.

Mostly rosy news, which should of course be tempered by the problems with the way the research was carried out.  Things get more interesting, though, by splitting up the responses to the same questions across diverse types of client.  And I continued to find two things.  First, there were no decidedly better outcomes when giving loans to more educated clients.  Second, individual loans worked much better than group loans.

Start with the education repartition.  FDEA gives loans to a pretty diverse group of clients; although it’s odd to see supposedly poor women come into the office to repay their loans with stacks of 10,000 Franc bills, the average loan only translates to $839 per person and only about 3 in 10 of my participants reached high school, for example, which is about the average of the Senegalese population.  So it’s true that the loans are likely not getting to the poorest of the poor because of FDEA’s requirement for clients to save 25% the amount of an individual loan or 10% of a group loan in an account before acquiring that loan, but the clients are light-years from rich, especially by Western standards.  Thus there are plenty of very poor borrowers, and educational attainment is the best proxy I can really use to separate the wealthy from the poor (or really the poor from the poorer).  Anyway, looking solely at the positive side of the loan impacts, it seems that the better-educated actually do better; 5 of 6 of those who attained high school and 8 of 9 of those who speak French reported an increase in income/expenses, compared with only half and a third of the respective converse groups.  But this effect is reversed when looking at negative impacts; two-thirds of both of the educated groups have had at least one problem with a repayment, compared to less than half for the other groups.  No idea what this means exactly, but the only story I can come up with is that the higher levels of education are making the educated groups’ use of their loans more creative, which leads to better end results but also more risk from month to month.  Or it could just be that the data is all screwed up.

Moving on to the split by type of loan, this narrative is pretty straightforward.  8 of every 9 individuals report an increase in income/expenses, compared to less than 4 of 9 with a group loan.  63% of those in a group report having had problems reimbursing, compared with only 46% of those with individual loans.  And a qualitative analysis of the individual interviews highlights this same phenomenon.  You hear a lot about the supposed solidarity of group loans, but often times this “solidarity” is no more than the president of the group having to pay for other members who get pregnant or sick, fail in their work, or just don’t feel like paying.  I met one woman who was president of her group and was successful in making back her share of the repayment, but ended up having to sell the cows she was keeping for herself at the end of the loan to repay for those few women who refused to.  She still hasn’t recuperated all her money.  So as is clear from this story, groups pose pretty big problems when the women aren’t doing collective work, but even when they are working together the possibility of pregnancy or sickness still multiplies the risk of default with every person added to the group.

The other interesting part of this research comes from my question about the fees that clients would consider reasonable; to some I asked how much they would be willing to pay for the loan if they had to pay one price, and for others I asked what their ideal monthly interest payments would be.  There are more detailed analyses in the paper itself, but the overall desired yearly interest rate when putting all the responses together turned out to be 11.5%.  This isn’t horribly close to the 15% that FDEA currently charges, but the difference isn’t radically large, either.  So it seems that 15% is a little high but generally reasonable, which makes sense given that 15% is pretty low compared to the 26% median rate across microfinance institutions around the world (info courtesy of CGAP).  And about 6 in 10 of my respondents think the interest rate is too high.  But based on what I heard, the problems with indebtedness generally have nothing to do with interest, but rather just with those who generally fail to make any money while working.  And FDEA stops compounding interest on unpaid sums a year after the missed payment, so the “cycle of debt” is pretty foreign to clients here.

Cut these interest rate responses into the same groups of respondents as above and you get mostly the same results.  The difference between the educated and non-educated is statistically insignificant, so once again the greater social impact of giving loans to the poorer possible clients seems to have little downside in terms of operations.  But while the annual interest rate desired by those in groups is only 6.8%, individuals’ average response is 15% exactly.  This indicates once again that individuals are more successful with their loans and better at repaying.  If — an impossible if — overhead costs could be kept the same while switching all loans to individual, then the current interest rate would seem not to need to be changed.  It’s certainly true that the group loans are a necessary component for an organization that would like to extend its reach to rural (and thus poorer) areas, since most of those potential clients need the logistical support of a group in order to take out a loan.  But it seems that at least for this one institution, trying to slowly increase the current 7% with individual loans by giving those loans to others who would lose nothing by leaving a group seems to be a policy worth trying.

But the first part of that last sentence is the most important; instead of taking generalized conclusions from this slice of research, we should likely take its small scope at face value.  I would be loath to say that these generally positive conclusions mean that all microfinance is working well, and equally that the conclusions about the success of individual loans mean that we should start to move away from group lending everywhere.  But it’s pretty clear that FDEA is a good example of a profitable, self-sustaining institution with a positive social benefit, and so my research was pretty rewarding.  (And I’ll be sure to use that Google-translated English version as a writing sample whenever I need one in the future.)

So I’ll end with that.  For those of you who have made it this far — both in this post and with the blog in general — thank you for following along.  It’s been a somewhat long, very interesting, usually fun, and sometimes strange trip, and it’s been great to know that people have cared enough to follow along with my adventures.  Can’t wait to see all of you and hear what’s been going on in your lives while I’ve been doing all the talking.  Until then.

Running out of material (Part II)

As you can tell by the title, I was planning to give an in-depth description my house and my life at home, as I did for my family in Dakar. But life is too short, and French Harry Potter Book Six is too long, for that tediousness. If you’re really wondering, my house is a big white concrete square with a main concrete-walled TV area and rooms (including mine) opening out onto this main area. (You can get some idea of the layout and ambiance from the photos I’ve been putting up on my site.) And here are some quick descriptions of each member of the house, just so you get a brief list of cast and characters along with my stunningly detailed portrayal of the interior design I’ve been living with:

• Pa Diop – Father figure; thoughtful, analytical, and stoic.
• Ma Sow – Loud, usually joking with her kids. Has no problems asking for my possessions, but still very nice.
• Ma Diop (14), Cheikh Tidiane (12), Boudy (10) – Pa Diop and Ma Sow’s three oldest kids. (The rest of the kids, other than Adama, are cousins from Pa Diop’s side of the family, here because Mekhe has a better education system than the village the family comes from, in the north of the country.) All future journalists if they keep up their level of questioning, and generally the loudest kids in the house.
• Demba (19) – Smartest kid in the house, with an interest in English. Clicks his tongue to signal affirmation, probably because he tries not to open his mouth more than necessary.
• Talla (19) – Very nice. Plays soccer. Makes tea every night. Doesn’t talk much, either.
• Amadou (16) – Runs the house, opening the door whenever someone comes. Quietly sits reflecting on the steps on the way upstairs while everyone else watches TV. Only one who doesn’t really follow the strict religious observance.
• Amina (18?) – Generally leads the girls in their housework. Very funny, having mastered many others’ mannerisms and using them to good effect.
• Awa (15) – Amadou’s sister. Absolutely never talks. Only got to the house this year.
• Yaya (14) – Cheikh Tidiane’s best friend. Very similar.
• Adama (5) – Pa Diop and Ma Sow’s fourth kid. Climbs all over me all day. Just starting to learn French; tells me to “legahd” when he means to command me to “regarde,” or look at him.

So I’ll finish up this last post from Mekhe with a quick update of some past, current, and future events, along with some random anecdotes and thoughts. First, as previewed, Tabaski happened on Sunday. Our two sheep are now in paradise, according to Boudy, having been butchered next to the shower after the rest of the boys and men in the house went to Mosque. My job most of the day was to cut onions for the meat sauce, out of which came a few open wounds and a newfound deftness with my hands. As soon as the sheep were chopped and sliced, the family inhabited the tiny strip of open area next to the kitchen for hours while meat was grilled and eaten and grilled and eaten. Then we went inside to have some more meat for the late lunch at 5:30. Then a break from the meat, but not from eating, with some sweet yogurt and millet. At this point, everyone put their boubous back on, taking tours of the neighborhood in small groups. I went on a walk with Demba, enduring a nice round of proselytism from people whose most compelling argument for me converting to Islam was “being Muslim is better.” I even got a “your president is Muslim” argument, to which I responded with a round of English swearing. (I probably wouldn’t be joining those sheep in paradise, in their mind, after saying the same in French. So I figured English was a good outlet.) I’ve really enjoyed the learning experience that’s come out of being in a different religious environment, but it’s obviously often been tough.  Eventually Demba and I arrived home, well in time for a late dinner identical to lunch. The end.

My life at work is slowly, slowly coming to a close. I’ve finished all my interviews and now stare at my computer screen all day, like a good brain-dead white collar worker, writing my report about my findings that I’m to turn in to my supervisor and to Waly. I’ve written 15 of the 20 pages I’m going for, and will likely finish the editing process sometime during my last week in Dakar (next week), which will be spent with one last class session for every one of my courses and plenty of down time. In between now and that last week, though, I’ve got a nice weekend of travel ahead of me, which will feel as improvised as the mechanics holding together the cars I’ll be taking. Starting Friday morning in Mekhe with my seemingly hundreds of pounds of luggage, I’ll stand on the side of the main road until a big ugly bus is barreling down at me. I’ll hail down the bus, which will be privately owned but open to the public, stopping the journey of the dozens of people inside so that I can engage in a yelling bout over the price for my journey to Dakar and then help them put my bags on the top of the bus, and we’ll head of with me comfortably settled on a wood bench. Every time a person gets off the bus on the way, I’ll look out the window to make sure they’re not taking my bags. I’ll get to Dakar after a couple hours, taking a taxi to my old host family’s house to drop off my stuff, and then I’ll immediately turn around to take a 7-place taxi a couple hours south to Kaolack. If Kaolack were a sheep, it would not be going to my paradise; its grunge and bustle make it the only place in Senegal I haven’t really liked. But I’ll spend the night there in anticipation of a university friend’s brother’s wedding the next morning. Then I’ll head another hour or so south for the wedding party, only to turn around the next morning to go back up to Dakar. Then the fun really starts, or ends, or something. (I’ve forgotten a crucial aspect of all this, which is that now that I’ve been here for so long I know that all of this will only happen if God wills it. Every time I tell someone a future plan of mine, they’ll be sure to calmly interject “insha’allah” at the end of my narrative, as if they’re adding an element of profundity to the conversation that was sorely lacking before I acknowledged that we’d better hope that part of God’s grand plan allows my trip to occur, without the bus driver hitting any sheep on the road whom God has fast-tracked to paradise.)

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons. After all this, the program ends on Friday the 11th, leaving me to welcome my mom (the actual one), and later my dad and brother, to Senegal before heading down to South Africa until the 29th, when I’ll head home.

I’ve had a great time here in Mekhe, getting into a daily routine in which one day melts into the next, but I’ll be happy to get back to somewhere more animated than a small town. My Wolof has improved to the point of very short conversation ability, mostly from my daily chats with the lady whose coffee table I stop by every day after work more so to try my Wolof than to drink her Cafe Touba. But the reactions evoked when trying to speak Wolof didn’t make me inclined to waiver from French given the opportunity to stick with it; most people just laugh, wondering why I’m trying to speak a language they see as mostly utilitarian, since they aren’t actually Wolof. I love getting ridiculed as much as the next person, but in these cases the easy solution has generally been to switch to French. It’s been nice to get exposure to a new form of language, and I’ve gotten pretty decent at expressing what I need to people who speak no French, so I’ll call it even.

Now to finish this paper. I’ll wrap everything up here next week. (Insha’allah.)

22 Catch 22′s

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all. It turns out that Friday is just Tabaski Preparation Day, or something. So I have work off but the big holiday isn’t until tomorrow. Anyway:

You’ve heard all these stories before in various forms. And I’ll spoil the somewhat worn conclusion, that life everywhere is complicated and it’s hard enough to understand the issues without even having to think about solutions. Nonetheless, I’m still writing this post because the specifics of the complexities of some facets of life here are pretty interesting and different than their counterparts in all the similar accounts from around the world. (Draw out the sentence tree for that one.)

Given my recent work, the easiest issue to start with is microfinance, and more specifically, microcredit. I got into some of its disparate effects a couple posts ago, and there’s more numerical analysis to come, but I think the stories of a couple particular clients I’ve come across during my internship illustrate as well as any numbers the good and the bad of these loans. The first client lives in a traditional fishing village called Lompoul, about an hour northwest of Mekhe on the Atlantic Ocean. The credit agent Diadji and I make the requisite stop at the village chief’s compound, sitting in chairs on the sand between huts and more modern-style houses and explaining FDEA until he appreciates our presence in his village enough to let us move on. So along with the driver, Pap, we drive on to this old client’s house for me to interview her. (Diadji has a couple clients to see in the village, but the trip has mostly been organized for me to get some interviews in.) We pull up to a house compound enclosed by a white concrete fence, in which is engraved “F.D.E.A.” in a roughshod manner right next to the door. I figure this one will be interesting. They’re finishing up preparing a lunch of ceeb-u jën, which they make us eat before anything else. Then I take a seat on the ledge outside the main building of the compound and start my interview with Codou Diop, a woman who claims an age of 50 but shows more early 60s. A widow with 17 to feed in her house, she begins to tell me in good French how she’s taken out loans with a group of nine other women for more than ten years, using the money to increase the scale of their collective farming operations. This current loan, of about $2700 to be split among the women and be repaid after six months, has proven somewhat problematic, as a couple of the women turned out to be pregnant and have been unable to work. So she thinks they’ll be a couple months late in fully reimbursing. But she hastens to switch the topic, given the opportunity when I ask different questions, to describe how her life has changed since beginning to borrow from FDEA. “That was my entire house,” she begins, pointing at the small building to our right, now joined by three bigger ones surrounding the courtyard we’re in. Back then, she made between $10 and $15 a month doing small-scale farming, and although her husband was still around to help out, they skipped a meal a day and didn’t eat much for the other two. I think you know the rest of the story without me telling it. She now makes upwards of $110 a month by having increased the scale of the farming and the commerce associated with it; she avows having had greater authority in making collective decisions with her husband before his death; she paid for professional school for one of her daughters to learn couture; and, as I could attest to after my lunch, the whole house now eats three full meals a day. She asserts similar success for the rest of her village involved with FDEA, proudly recounting how five of the 17 students graduating high school last year are now at a university. Do you want to take out another loan after this one, I ask, one of the last questions of every interview. She responds emphatically: “I won’t leave it until I die.”

The next day, Diadji and I hop in the truck to go on what he describes as a routine loan recovery trip through Mekhe. We stop at a few houses of women who aren’t home, with Diadji menacing whoever happens to be home with the threat that if the loan isn’t repaid soon, “the American who’s here to help us out in collecting the money we’re owed will come see you personally.” (He seems to get too much of a kick out of this to consider its awkwardness, or the fact that I can’t even really speak these people’s language enough to do anything if I do realize his empty threat.) Then, before heading back to the office, we make one last stop, pulling up under a big “tree of discussion” surrounded by sand and shade in the center of town. Diadji opts for yelling the name of the man owing FDEA money instead of gracing him by getting out of the truck, and the man gets up from whatever discussion the tree was providing, leaving the three other old men looking puzzled in their traditional robes as he approaches the truck to stand outside Diadji’s window. Given that this man is an elder, Diadji and he exchange greetings in the traditional manner done to show respect – by repeating each others’ last names over and over again. “Diop,” “Dieng,” “Diop, Diop,” “Dieng,” they go back and forth for thirty seconds or so, until getting into the normal round of “Where is your family?” and “Have you spent the day with peace?” and the formulated responses of “They are there” and “Thanks to God.” (The only reason I’ve gotten for the name deal is that it’s meant to show you’re acknowledging the other’s presence. Never considered that anyone didn’t think I existed after saying hi to me, but among the things I’ve learned here is that most cultural differences are inexplicable.) Then, as happens with the women in the office, they start the main event, going back and forth quickly in Wolof over some matter. Diadji pauses every minute or so to explain to me, sitting in the back seat, what’s going on. “He’s owed us money since 2002,” he says, 849,000 Francs (about $1900) in total, since he didn’t repay the money he borrowed to raise and sell sheep. (I don’t find out the rest of his story, but it’s likely similar to another man I interviewed who took out a loan with nine others to raise sheep two years ago, and the sheep all got sick and died. This other man now doesn’t work, borrowing money from friends to pay for meals and slowly paying back 5000 Francs a month of the 150,000 he still owes. He never had problems giving his family food before all this but now goes hungry many days. But that’s a different story.) Although interest stops accruing after a year of indebtedness, FDEA’s pestering does not, although I never get a real answer as to why they’ve waited until now to see this man. “He gave his house as collateral for the loan,” Diadji stops to tell me matter-of-factly, “and so we’re going to take him to the police station to start the process of seizing it if he doesn’t bring in at least 100,000 Francs by Tuesday.” (All individual loans require some sort of collateral that usually greatly outweighs the worth of the loan itself, but Diadji later explains to me that this is yet another empty threat; they’ve never, during his time there, actually seized a house or anything of real value.) The man, increasingly panicked and pleading with Diadji, frantically pulls his wallet out of his pocket, taking out the 30,000 Francs that are in there and stuffing it in Diadji’s hand. I figure Diadji will make the man keep it until a more formal repayment, but I’m wrong; “Good,” Diadji says, “now bring the rest soon.” We soon drive off, leaving this man behind to go back to his discussion. He came in this past Tuesday with 10,000 additional Francs, which seems to have placated Diadji for the moment despite the earlier menacing about 100,000. So yeah, it turns out there are people whose lives actually get screwed up by this stuff. In theory, the question of whether microcredit is “good” or “bad” in the aggregate should be empirical, but the few real mathematical analyses that have been done on that question to this point have done nothing but muddy the waters. I’ve been trying to get at that question with my research, but my real answer is that I have no idea.

Equally confusing is the debate about language and language policy, which I gestured at in my last post. Over a lunch of mafe (white rice with heavy peanut sauce) one day, I asked Pa Diop what he thought of the fact that the language used in all his children’s classes is French. He had seemed to me to be pretty utilitarian about stuff like this, never engaging with me in Wolof like his wife does for reasons, I suspected, having to do with his rationalization of his use of the language of colonialism so that he could succeed professionally. But he had a much more interesting response than this rationalization of French that I expected was coming. “As much as people recognize French’s presence as a product of colonialism,” he said, “it’s sort of the neutral alternative to fighting between ethnic groups.” Turns out that back in the day, the national assembly used Wolof for all its affairs, since 90% of citizens speak the language despite the Wolof group’s plurality of only 35%. (I haven’t yet actually figured out how this came to be, since despite being the biggest group 35% is still pretty small.) At some point, though, the members of the assembly who weren’t from the Wolof tribe grew restless of essentially acquiescing to the Wolofs in the room every time they opened their mouths. So the Peuls started speaking Pulaar on the floor, the Diolas started speaking Diola, and so on, until no one could understand any other group and the assembly turned as dysfunctional as the current U.S. Senate. (It was probably more civil, actually, since as far as I know there was no Joe Lieberman to posture about moderacy every time a cloture vote came up, and if there was then most would have had the good fortune of not understanding his language.) So they switched to French as the “neutral alternative” in the late 80s, and although this created somewhat of a bias toward better-educated candidates to win elections (God forbid), the legislature was at least able to function. (So to keep up the analogy with the U.S. Congress, it became more like the House.) “People are much happier speaking French than they are speaking the language of someone else’s tribe,” attested Pa Diop. And the same situation plays out at the level of schools; unless every school were to create separate classes for each tribe in their own language (separate but equal, anyone?) all teaching would occur in Wolof, which the 65% wouldn’t be so happy about. All this is a reminder that as horrible as the colonial past is in every country like Senegal, reducing matters to black vs. white or West vs. Third World is usually ridiculously simplistic. (Further evidence, you could contend, that the “things were soo much better in the past” argument is baseless.) So how to get rid of a vestige of colonialism without alienating all the minority ethnic groups? No idea.

The last impossible issue I’ll go over is one bound by a self-perpetuating mix of politics and religion whose effects are visible every day in most cities and towns throughout Senegal. First, I should explain that the practice of Islam here is quite different than in your typical Muslim country in the Middle East. The largest brotherhood of Muslims, called the Mourides, are run by religious leaders and teachers called marabouts. These marabouts carry huge influence; people take their word as truth, and the names of famous marabouts throughout history are plastered on buses and storefronts throughout the country. (Cheikh Tidiane, one of my host brothers, is named after a marabout, and many of the women’s groups taking out loans at FDEA give themselves names like “Sope Serigne Fallou” or “Ababacar Sy.”) And the 99.99999999% rate of religiousness allows no room for religious questioning; “There’s no need to reflect about God, you should just know He exists,” in the words of Demba, my otherwise very smart 19-year old host brother. So since people tend to vote for the candidate recommended by their marabout, politicians bow down to the marabouts to get votes more so than any U.S. presidential candidate could every get away with bowing down to big business. (And that’s saying a lot.) So the marabouts can do whatever the hell they want, and religious freedom is all fine and well until it starts impinging on other people’s freedom. Most of these people, in the case of Senegal, happen to be children. These children, called Talibe, are sent by their parents for reasons of poverty or (more frequently) ideology to daaras, religious “schools” where the children are to learn Arabic and the Koran from a marabout in lieu of learning French. But despite the riches of many of these marabouts, they don’t give the kids any food or provide them with more than one set of dirty clothes. Half the kids’ time is spent in squalid conditions copying text from old Korans to wood panels, and the other half is spent begging for food and money. They get to eat the food, but the money goes to the marabout, and if they don’t bring in enough every day then they’re subject to corporal punishment (i.e., beating). They’re instantly recognizable by their dirty clothes and small metal pots they carry around to collect alms, and one or two of them show up at my house here twice a day, at breakfast and lunch, to ask for food. (This asking actually consists of standing outside the main room and grunting from time to time to make their presence known until Pa Diop summons them over to dump some rice into their bowl of various other crap given to them by other people. Then they move off wordlessly.) Pa Diop actually spent some of his childhood years as a Talibe, splitting his time between French school and the daara, and he’s of the majority opinion that it’s good for the kids since it makes them “figure things out for themselves” and learn humility. Perhaps having to beg for food is stretching the definition of “figuring things out,” but I decided this wasn’t a good point to argue. He does think that the daaras in cities are closer to exploitation, but I don’t honestly see any difference between the practices here and in Dakar. In Dakar, I got in the habit of buying 20 cent packs of cookies to give to the kids whenever they asked for money, but even small gestures like that beg certain questions. Every time I give them cookies, or Pa Diop gives them rice, it’s quietly keeping the wheels of the whole operation turning even if we’re not giving money directly to the marabout (which plenty of people do anyway given Islam’s requirement to give a certain amount to others per year). But if politicians have no power to change things given their acquiescence to all things marabout, and the only way to throw a wrench into the way things run would be to mount a campaign to make kids starve, which seems more than a tad inappropriate given the end goal to improve these kids’ lives (and also would never happen given that people think the daaras are a good thing), then how will this ever stop? No idea.

I could keep going. The state encourages scholarship, giving all of its university students a small stipend, so that they can graduate into an empty job market. Cultural conservatism breeds cultural conservatism, trapping many women in a cycle of housework and childbearing. And so on. These are all issues of development but clearly extend much farther than pocketbook problems. I think it’s naïve to act as if we don’t have similar problems even in supposedly “developed” countries, but the ones here particularly stand out given that they haven’t been dulled to me by their perpetual presence in my life. So if you’re looking for a conclusion, a lesson to take away from all this, then see above.

(Special prize for anyone who can identify where my title comes from, aside obviously from the Heller book.)

Quick hits

What’s going on here while I work on another post:

• Although I understand very little of the Wolof spoken at home, I now understand absolutely none of the conversation other than when it’s in French. This is due to the fact that Pa Diop’s sister, the mother of two kids here, is visiting. Like the rest of the family, she’s from the Peul tribe, but unlike the rest of the family, she speaks only Pulaar and no Wolof. (She comes from a remote area in the north of the country where Wolof hasn’t yet taken over.) Pulaar bears almost no resemblance to Wolof, and so I’m even more lost than before since the family’s conversation is now mostly in Pulaar. In somewhat related news, I’ve had some interesting conversations with Pa Diop about language and language policy that I’ll relate soon.
• I’ve run out of books in English, so I’ve started reading my host family’s collection of Harry Potter books in French. Hogwarts is now Poudlard; Snape’s name has been changed to Rogue for some reason; and Slytherin is Serpentard, to name a few changes in translation. So it’s twice as entertaining as in English.
• Speaking of changes in translation, my barber yesterday didn’t understand the haircut I was asking for, so I now have even less hair than my previous low. Usually I promise to post pictures of novel events. I will not make that promise this time.
• The reason I was getting my hair cut? One of the two biggest Muslim holidays of the year, called Tabaski here in Senegal and Id al-Adha in Arabic, is on Friday. So while Americans give thanks for Glenn Beck and apple pie, people here will be celebrating the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac to God back in the day. Since the tale goes that God gave Abraham a sheep to kill as a substitute for Isaac and as a reward for being willing to do something totally ridiculous, every family here buys its own sheep to eat. (Crazy, this seems to be the same God as in the Bible! Who woulda known?) (I hope you’ve learned by now not to take anything I say seriously.) Anyway, everyone aims to look their best by going to the tailor to get a new boubou – the long, traditional robe worn on formal occasions – and getting the aforementioned haircut. If this is anything like the last big holiday, Korité, then the buildup is a much bigger deal than the actual event. And that sounds like the case, since from what I can tell the day is spent sitting at home with the family, looking nice and eating meat. I don’t think Turkey Day for Sheep Day is a trade I would make more than once, but the one time should be fun.
• Every few days, there’s a strike by the local high school students. Apparently the government was too ndank ndank in getting the new high school building ready for the beginning of the school year in early October, so many classrooms are still without tables and chalkboards. In response, the high school students decide every few days to stop all cars on the national road going through Mekhe, and they go into the other area schools and generally create havoc. So a couple times a week, I’ll come home for my lunch break and the younger kids in the house will be off of school for the rest of the day because of the disruptions in their schools due to the strike. The high school students in my house are very studious, but anyone who doesn’t strike is seen as a traitor, so they take an active part in it all. They treat it very matter-of-factly, which struck me as comic for a while until, you know, you think about the situation.
• It was my mom’s 30th birthday yesterday. Happy birthday, Mom!  (And I neglected to post something for my brother Oliver’s birthday, which was a couple weeks ago.  So happy birthdays all around.)

More to come later in the week, hopefully.

“Mr. Economics” actually talks econ?

Results gleaned from research or data analysis tend to come in three categories.  First, and most prevalent, are the useless ones.  Then at the opposite end of the spectrum are the types of results that tend to get headlines, the ones for which people really do research on whatever interests them.  But somewhere in the middle are the relatively unimportant but nonetheless intellectually interesting results that end up in the last paragraph of the newspaper article.  It’s this last type of result that I’ve actually tended to find coolest, since they’re generally the hardest to predict.

So I’ve started to do some analysis on the 15 interviews I’ve done so far, and I’ve come across some of these insignificant but interesting results that wouldn’t be apparent without any sort of synthesis.  As I mentioned a few posts ago, one of my interview questions asks how much the client would be willing to pay to obtain the loan if they just had to pay one price at the conclusion of the loan instead of installments of interest payments.  My original aim with this question was to try to see in a not-so-subtle (and maybe sort of stupid) way whether these loans are actually having a significantly positive impact in these people’s lives, since the impact of microcredit has been a big subject of debate within development economics.  But it’s given me some other interesting data that I never would have predicted.

First, I noticed that a significant proportion of my respondents – 38 percent, to be exact – say they would be willing to pay more for the loan than the sum of their actual interest payments.  To illustrate this phenomenon, take the imaginary example of a woman who has taken out a $100 loan and who says she’d be willing to pay $10 for this loan if she had to pay one single price for it.  In reality, she has to pay $1 interest with every monthly repayment, and she has to make six monthly repayments.  So in total, she has to pay only $6, but she nonetheless says she’d be willing to pay $10.  This seems to make no sense given that 58 percent of respondents think the interest rate is too high, and the conventional wisdom about microfinance organizations has said the same thing.  Put these two results together, and it looks like you’ve got a nice example of my first category of result – useless.  So my hypothesis at this point was just that the observations of most behavioral economists – that people can’t be trusted to think rationally, let alone respond to interviews in a reasonable manner – were proving themselves true in my case.

But I kept looking.  (Sorry…I’m making this sound like I was doing some brave and honorable task.)  And it turned out that, neatly enough, among the 38% of those willing to “overpay,” exactly none of them were among the 58% who told me that they thought the interest rate was too high.  Looked at another way, only the people who would pay less for the loan than the sum of their current interest payments think that interest is too high.  So I’m now faced with a second possible hypothesis:

• There’s a sizable subset of clients who are productive enough with the loans that they don’t think twice about the interest they’re faced with.
• These people are, naturally, more productive with higher levels of capital.  As such, if they got to temporarily keep some more of the loan money by not paying any interest until the end – as would happen in the hypothetical that I pose in my question – they would more effectively leverage their capital to gain more profit.
• Recognizing their own productivity and recognizing the added productivity from not having to pay interest until the end, these people will pay more to obtain the loan with the imaginary condition I impose.
• The other group (i.e., the more unproductive one) doesn’t gain as much from having extra time to repay interest, and so the driving calculation in the amount they’d be willing to pay is their idea that the “service charge” for obtaining the loan, or the interest, is currently too high.  So they’d pay less than the sum of the interest payments they currently pay.

I think it’s going too far to expect that these calculations are actually overtly taking place in the clients’ minds during the 30 seconds they take to respond to my question.  But it can still be the case that the realities of those calculations are manifesting themselves in those responses. This would be pretty cool if true, since in this version of things everything appears to work out perfectly without anyone seeming so crazy for being willing to pay more for a loan than they currently have to.  And this is also a good lesson for me; it makes me realize that the minute specifics of the question I’m asking do matter, since the fact that the interest wouldn’t have to be paid until the end of the loan would seem to make a difference, when I originally thought it would be mostly irrelevant.  It’s still entirely possible that the people who would be willing to pay more than the sum they currently have to pay are just expressing our tendency for economic ridiculousness, as the first hypothesis would predict.  But here’s hoping the second, more interesting, hypothesis is true.  (Now I just need to figure out how to get this result into the last paragraph of that nonexistent newspaper article.)

Some other, more straightforward, results from so far are as follows.  (Keep in mind, though, that there are quite a few biases that could be corrupting this data.  My sample is far from random, for one, and the respondents likely know the types of responses I’d like to hear.)  Anyway:

• 82% report a positive change in income and/or expenditures since having started to borrow money.
• 92% report that the benefits from having a loan are greater than the possible problems from indebtedness, but 46% have been late repaying at least once.
• 43% of women report increased authority with their husbands in making household decisions since having started to borrow.
• 50% volunteer (without being specifically asked) that regardless of how much they make from the loans, they’re happy with having borrowed because it allows them to work.  (This one I hadn’t thought of before.)
• 87% report definitely wanting another loan in the future.

So it’s pretty clear that the small sample of people I’ve interviewed at least think, for the most part, that the loans are having a positive effect on their lives.  Whether this positive impact is truly real is harder to get at.  But one reason that some people doubt the impact of microcredit is because of the possibility of indebtedness, and it’s here that FDEA does pretty well.  They do make individual borrowers guarantee property of some sort in the case of inability to repay the loans, but respondents have been very grateful that the organization tends to rely much more on social connections to get people to repay than strong-arm tactics like legal action or confiscation of property.  And there are just some people they decide they should let go without repaying.  So it seems that FDEA pretty well avoids destroying people’s lives, thus allowing the positive impacts of the loans to stand out without too much negative.  But those are just my current thoughts, and they could change if future respondents have different things to say.

There’s plenty more data, but most people don’t get as excited reading dry statistics as I do, so I’ll stop here for now.  For those who thought my life was all surfing and golf, I hope you’ve stopped reading by now so that I can maintain the illusion that I’m really rad.  And for those of you who thought that I think only in vast cultural generalizations, I hope these specifics actually have changed your mind about something.

Also, if anyone could send me an email or post a comment letting me know what you think of the new Kid Cudi and Wale albums, that’d be great.  Can’t get a fast enough internet connection to buy and download anything.  (Number of days we didn’t have internet at work because the grown-ups hadn’t gotten around to paying the bill: 5.)  Thanks.

Running out of material (Part I)

I actually do have some other things to write about, but I figure that it’s more worthwhile for the moment to let you know what day-to-day life is like here. (Part II, if I ever get around to it, will be the same description of the house and family that I did in Dakar.) So here’s round two of my day-in-the-life posts:

• 5:30 am – A tangle of suffocating mosquito net wakes me up. My blowing fan has me shivering, so I crawl through the net, turn it off and climb back into bed. Straighten out my net and search for a pillow. I find my arm instead. Go back to sleep.
• 7 am – Wake up exhausted. I stick my arm out of my mosquito net to hit snooze on my cell phone alarm a few times. I wish I could hit snooze on the roosters next door.
• 7:15 am – Take a freezing cold shower. This was refreshing at one point, but now that the mornings are chilly, it’s motivation to get in and out quick. (I always take longer than I want, though, since I have to wash my boxers by myself; the girls of the house do my laundry, but it’s culturally unacceptable to give them underwear.) I’m greeted by a wonderful smell given that the shower and the toilet share the same area out back Then I throw on my clothes for the day – usually a button-up or polo shirt with khakis.
• 7:45 am – The rest of the house is up and moving; the kids are all showering and getting dressed for school, while Ma Sow helps the maid clean up the house. The maid has finished preparing my breakfast, so I eat my chocolate sandwich and drink my Cafe Touba sitting at the little table in the main room and getting blinded by the rising sun. (I supply the chocolate spread from my room, since for some odd reason they insist on keeping it in there. It might make sense if they were trying to keep the kids from eating it, but they’re not.) As usual in this house, I feel horribly spoiled; while everyone else is going about things autonomously, they insist that I sit and be served breakfast by myself. Over the course of my breakfast, the kids leave for school – I guess they eat breakfast during a mid-morning break – and Ma Sow leaves to open her little fabric and beauty shop. Pa Diop is still nowhere to be seen. I finish within ten minutes, and they don’t let me clear my cup or clean the table.
• 8 am – I take the ten-minute walk to work, half over sand roads and half over one of the two main paved roads. The beeping taxis during my morning walk in Dakar have been replaced here by children accosting me. They’re everywhere; it is, of course, a developing country with children comprising around half of the population. Most shout “toubab” at me from a distance, while others come and shake my hand and say the only word of French they’ve yet learned: “Bonjour.” (They make sure to say it repeatedly.) I’m one of three toubabs here in Mekhe – aside from me and Trina, there’s a Peace Corps volunteer here – and so I’m quite the novelty. But I’m still not sure what the kids who shout at me from a distance hope to accomplish; do they think I’ll reward them for having correctly identified the color of my skin? Some of the kids who directly approach me are very cute. Others have snot coming out of their nose. And many ask for money. My response to this last group is now to ask for their money in return, which confuses them horribly. Some even end up giving me some. (Don’t worry, I know what you’re wondering, and yes, I will pay all the required taxes on that money I receive I do give the money back.) All those kids range from ages five to fifteen, and the older ones are usually the more obnoxious ones who ask for money or think they’ve shown me to be stupid if I respond back to whatever they say. Once I’m on the main road, I’m in the midst of the morning rush hour. This usually means a car or two will pass me, and otherwise horse-drawn carriages pass by every 30 seconds or so. Half of these carriages are essentially the local taxis for hire if someone wants to get somewhere in town, and the other half are carrying heavy goods somewhere else. Lining the main road are tables where people who don’t eat breakfast at home can sit and have their Cafe Touba and bread for pretty cheap. (Nearly everyone here drinks Cafe Touba instead of the instant powdered coffee, since Cafe Touba isn’t imported and is thus cheaper.)
• 8:15 am – Arrive at work and am already starving again; the bread here is the same as in Dakar. I exchange greetings with the guard, a 70-something man who’s great, and go upstairs to see my supervisor Khadi. She likes to see me first thing to see that I’m not late, which she cares about despite the ndank ndank culture and the fact that I’m not getting paid for working. (She didn’t really believe my excuse the day I got in at 8:35 because one of the rabbits had died overnight and its morning burial out back made my breakfast late.) I head downstairs, where the rest of the offices are. If at least one of the three other employees hasn’t yet shown up, I can take their ethernet cable to use on my laptop for 20 minutes before they come in, assuming the internet is working. This isn’t always a good assumption, though; yesterday, for example, someone had forgotten to pay the internet bill, so we were cut off. And most other days there’s some technical problem or another with connecting.
• 8:45 am – Everyone’s arrived. I’ve checked my email and loaded up enough reading material from various newspapers and blogs online to distract myself when needed while doing work. So I disconnect and go to Diadji’s office to start this work. Diadji, a funny man of about 30, is the credit agent for Mekhe and the surrounding area, and I work most closely with him. I get my own desk to his right in the fairly dark room. I spread my work out over the course of the day so as to keep myself at least a little bit occupied at all times, since as with most internships, the work is on and off. I’ve been working for Khadi on a spreadsheet synthesizing and analyzing the statistics in FDEA’s yearly reports since 2004, and I’m now recording the number and amount of first loans disbursed this year. (On some of those, the clients are illiterate and thus can’t sign their names, so their signatures are fingerprints. Fun to see.) Khadi’s generally liked the analysis that I’ve done on that data, so she’s starting to trust me more. So in addition to writing about the impacts of the loans in my final report, she’s also now asked me to ask to give recommendations about the practices of the organization. I’ve also been transferring all the notes I have from my interviews into a big spreadsheet to start analyzing that data. In addition to work, I’ve been learning how to play Spider Solitaire. (I just lost a game.) Clients (mostly women, but a few men) periodically come in to talk to Diadji, bringing with them their green loan record-keeping booklets. The meetings with clients who have a complaint, or with whom Diadji has some problem, are pretty comic. The conversation, as is required, starts with the necessary greetings and a lot of alhamdoulilahs (“Thanks to God”) for the fact that things are going. Then, once one side decides they’ve asked the same question enough times, things immediately turn intense. The only word I can usually pick out of these heated conversations is xaalis, or money. Most meetings, though, are very routine; generally, people come in to see if they can get a new loan. Then I return to reading and working.
• 10 am – If we’re going on a trip to the “field” today, now is when we’re supposed to leave. I don’t have to look up from my Spider Solitaire to know we’re not going anywhere for a little while.
• 11 am – Assuming still that this is an excursion day, now is around when we leave. Diadji and I go out to the backyard and get in the big FDEA truck, and the driver, Pap, takes his feet off the dashboard and starts the car. We get going. The trips so far have either been very close, just to different neighborhoods in Mekhe, or very far, to villages over an hour away. Diadji generally sets up the ones in Mekhe just to say hello to his clients and to let me do an interview or two in people’s houses. The farther trips have some purpose aside from allowing me to talk to people. Tuesday, for example, we went to a village with no power or water to run an information session with 50+ women who want to take out loans in groups of 8-10. Then we went to a satellite FDEA office in a town about the same size as Mekhe, where we picked up a computer for some reason or another and I got to do an interview. These trips only happen once or twice a week, though, and so the rest of the time I stay in the office. On these days, Diadji will sometimes set up for a client or two to come talk to me in the office, or he’ll ask a client who came in unannounced to respond to my questions. The pace of these interviews has slowed down from the beginning – I’ve done a total of 10 so far – but I’m still getting plenty of good information about how these loans are affecting people. Once I’ve written my final report I’ll post some of the results here. Each interview should theoretically take about 15 minutes to answer my 25 questions, but people have tended to be pretty loquacious and there are often some problems of understanding. So each has been going 30-45 minutes. About half of the interviews I can do alone, and half are with pure Wolof speakers, so I need a translator for those. Usually that’s Diadji or the guard at FDEA.
• 1 pm – My lunch break starts, so I walk home in the scorching heat. While lunch is being prepared, I read in the main room while some of the kids watch TV, or I hang out in my room. Pa Diop and Ma Sow each get back separately at around 1:30.
• 2 pm – Lunch is ready. I break what I think of as my six-hour hunger strike (still thinking up what I’m striking against) with Pa Diop, the ten-year old daughter Boudy, and the five-year old son Adama. We eat at the small table I eat breakfast at, using spoons around a big bowl. The rest of the family eats around an even bigger bowl on the floor. I don’t know how this arrangement was decided – maybe because Boudy and Adama are the youngest? Lunch is always a traditionally Senegalese dish, either a type of ceeb-u jën (rice with fish) or rice with a peanut-based sauce. The cooking is pretty good. Adama always dominates the first five minutes of conversation, rattling off about something or other in Wolof, and then he burns out and leaves the table. Then Pa Diop turns to me, and he usually has an interesting subject to talk about or is happy to talk about whatever I bring up. We’ve talked about American politics, international economics, religion, education in Senegal, and development. Whenever I can hear him – he’s very soft-spoken – it’s enlightening. We finish our lunch and he insists on leaving everything for the maid to clean up whenever I try to help. (He’s very well-educated but conservative about a lot of things, which is a frustratingly common combination here.)
• 2:30 pm – I head back to work, usually stopping in one of the two houses in our neighborhood that sell plastic bags full of frozen baobab or mango juice. I buy a bag for seven cents and eat it on the way. Because of the heat, goats and chickens tend to be my only companions on the road at this point. The afternoon at work is essentially the same as the morning. The guard breaks the short afternoon up with cups of ataaya (the sweet tea) at 3:30 and 4. Diadji usually lets me use his internet connection for half an hour or so before heading out.
• 5 pm – Head home for the second time in four hours. Some combination of kids is watching TV, and the others are somewhere else. I read some more or crash on my bed for an hour and listen to music.
• 6:30 pm – I go for my daily run as the sun sets, leaving the temperature very manageable. I usually run about 20-25 minutes outside of town to the east before turning back, going on a wide dirt road with nice savannah-type scenery of oddly-shaped trees dotting fields of sparse grass. I run back against a headwind in the dark. The dirt road is mostly empty save for the few horse-drawn carriages that pass me carrying their owners out of town and toward their villages for the night. As soon as I hit town I’m again the center of attention, even in the dark.
• 8 pm – After I shower, Pa Diop arrives home from work. He wakes up late but works this late to make up for it. He has secret handshakes with his four kids, and with the rest of the kids and me he shakes normally as Adama climbs all over him. He brings his soft mat out to the left of the TV, placing a sheepskin cover over it, and begins his calm set of nightly prayers. He does two sets of kneeling prayers (with an hour in between the two), and the rest of the time he sits watching TV while holding onto prayer beads. (The rest of the kids do the hourly prayers, too, but they tend to do them in their rooms.)
• 8:30 pm – Dinner is served. I sit on the floor across from Pa Diop, who puts his prayer beads down but stays on his mat. Adama burns out even faster at night, since he’s usually been eating sweets all day, and so Pa Diop and I talk again about whatever. Whereas lunch is always a traditional dish, dinner at our side bowl is often something Western but made Senegalese-style. The big bowl for Ma Sow and the kids is still usually traditionally Senegalese; they make something different for Pa Diop because they’re regulating his diet or something. Last night we had a big bowl of spaghetti, fries, omelets, and the traditional brown onion sauce. It was great, but I have no idea how that plays into the diet regulation. We actually have dessert pretty often; Ma Sow has been making something called Mohamsa a few nights a week, which is essentially hot rice pudding. Otherwise we’ve had fruit a couple times, and sometimes a big bag of peanuts is passed around.
• 9 pm – A typical after-dinner scene:

  Student leaves bedroom carrying book. Pa Diop is seated on floor to the left of TV, while seats in front of TV are taken up by kids. Pa Diop changes the TV from soap opera to French cable news channel. Boudy gets out of her seat in front of TV, insisting that Student sit there, and pulls up a wooden stool for herself. Talla – 18-year old kid – gives Student a handful of peanuts. Student starts eating and opens book.

  CHEIKH TIDIANE (12-year old) : You eat peanuts like a rabbit, Yoro.

  STUDENT: Oh, thanks. (Looks back down at book.)

  CHEIKH TIDIANE: Why do you eat peanuts like a rabbit?

  No response.

  MA DIOP (Actually a 17-year old daughter, not to be confused with Ma Sow, the mother of the family) : You know he’s just joking with you, Yoro, right?

  STUDENT: Yup. (Attempts to continue reading.)

  MA DIOP: You know here, we like to joke around too much.

  STUDENT: Yeah, um, you actually don’t have to explain every time someone’s joking…jokes do exist where I come from, too, believe it or not.

  Silence. Student begins reading again.

  BOUDY: Oh, now you made Ma Diop upset, Yoro.

  STUDENT: What? What did I do?

  BOUDY: It’s not nice to tell someone that they don’t need to tell you what they just told you.

  STUDENT: Really? Out of this whole exchange, that’s what stands out to you as “not nice”? Interesting. (Chalks it up to cultural differences and universal ridiculousness, and begins reading again.)

  CHEIKH TIDIANE: Do you know how to draw, Yoro?

  STUDENT: No. (Feels bad about being so distant, but really has no idea how to draw. Continues to read but has not yet turned a page.)

  CHEIKH TIDIANE: I’m going to draw you.

  Silence.

  CHEIKH TIDIANE (now leaning on Student and holding notebook with half-finished sketch) : Will you teach me the English alphabet?

  STUDENT: You take English classes at school but they haven’t taught you the alphabet yet?

  CHEIKH TIDIANE: No, they haven’t. I only remember A B C D E F G.

  Student puts down book and writes down alphabet in notebook. Picks book back up, stopping every so often to respond to Cheikh Tidiane’s questions about how to pronounce letters.

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  Student enters TV room carrying book.

  CHEIKH TIDIANE: You’re still reading that same book? You must be a slow reader.

  STUDENT: Yeah, something like that.

  MA DIOP: You know he’s just joking, right?

  And so it continues, infinitely amusing and always exhausting. From time to time Ma Sow stops this cycle by sitting in front of the TV and starting to talk to me. She often brings some religious crazy to the conversation, but usually it’s pretty pleasant. After a little while, I go up to the rooftop to get some air, and the temperature at this point is down to upper 60s/low 70s. From time to time Amadou, the quiet 16-year old who likes talking (or really whispering) to me about American rap, will go out with me. Other nights, it’s just me, the rabbits, and the sky. And the stars are pretty amazing. I wonder why they didn’t teach me one damned constellation in my intro astronomy class, and end up on a futile search for the Big Dipper. I catch a few shooting stars but no big pot. Defeated by the cosmos, I either talk on the phone to a friend or two on the program or head back downstairs.

• 11 pm – Some nights, the older kids are making ataaya, so I hang out in front of the TV and drink a couple cups with them while the younger kids and the parents get in bed. I’ve managed to get used to doing this enough for it not to keep me awake anymore. The maid comes in and sweeps away all the peanut shells and sand from the dirty floor. (She’s got a backbreaking job.) If there’s no tea, I start to get ready for bed myself. I brush my teeth at the faucet to the side of the house in the darkness, which is broken some nights by the family next door watching TV in their big sand courtyard. I head back inside and put up my mosquito net. (I decided one night that I didn’t need it and woke up the next morning with lines of bites down my arms.) Turn on my fan and turn off the lights, crawling under the net onto the foam mattress with purple tie-dye sheets. Fall asleep immediately.

I’ve only spent one of the two weekends here, so I don’t really have any routine yet, but both of those days were filled with quite a bit of nothingness and a couple games of soccer in the sand. Last weekend, as I mentioned, I took a trip to Thies with Trina and her host brother Ibou. Ibou’s family was very nice, and Thies is a calm city with a lot of open spaces and a big circular market at the center of town that we spent Saturday wandering around. This weekend I’m off to St. Louis to meet up with Casimir and a couple other program members, which will mean once again standing under a designated tree just outside Mekhe and waiting for an overcrowded bus to show up. This time, though, it’ll take us north. I’m staying with Casimir’s uncle, a priest, and doing who knows what, but I hear St. Louis is really nice.

Happy Friday the 13^th, and have a great weekend.

A narcissist’s progress report

Things are moving along in Mekhe.  At work, I’ve started the process of interviewing local women who have taken out loans from FDEA to try to figure out some of the effects of this access to credit.  I’ve been going at the rate of about two interviews a day, half with women who come into the office for whatever reason and the others while driving around with the credit officer to meet his clients.  There are certainly difficulties with this process, both due to language barriers (I often need the credit agent to translate for me when the women don’t speak any French) and cultural divides.  No one seems to practice any sort of rigorous personal accounting, making it a challenge to get hard numbers on changes in income or spending due to the loan.  And the idea of value being expressed in monetary terms is met with some resistance.  For example, in order to approximate the value of these loans and what the clients are earning because of them, I ask the women the amount they would be willing to pay for a loan if they had to pay a fixed price instead of making interest payments.  Even the women who speak French tend to need this translated into Wolof for them, and then it takes some time for them to laugh at what they think of as a ridiculous question and then formulate an approximate answer.  (For those of you who are curious, the amount they’ve been willing to pay has been very close to 8% of the overall value of the loan for all of the first few women I’ve interviewed.)  It’s hard work but interesting once I manage to get real answers out, and hopefully it’ll make for some sort of coherent analysis.

In terms of life outside work, it has become increasingly clear that Mekhe shuts down upon the setting of the sun.  (I’m not sure what I expected in a small Senegalese town, whose size I now think is around one square mile.)  This is probably all the better given that the front gate of my house gets closed at nine and that my whole family tends to keep tabs on my every movement.  Though living with my host family in Dakar was certainly different from living with friends at college, I was essentially autonomous to explore the big city without my host family wondering where I was or when I was coming home.  Here, I have to sneak out the front door if I want to go running by myself, lest my 15-year old and 12-year old host brothers ask to tag along.  If I’m going anywhere else, my 10-year old host sister wants to come along too.  So a three-minute walk to the corner store can end up taking an hour; first I spend some time responding to questions about where I’m going and why, then I wait for everyone to get ready to come along, then something comes up at the house (lunch, for example), and then everyone has to get ready again once that’s done.  This constant exposure to my family has been alternatively rewarding and exhausting.   I learn something new and substantial about them every day given my time spent talking to them, but I also have to make an effort to create time for myself.  I can usually seek shelter in my room for 20 minutes to listen to music, but even there, someone may wander in wondering what I’m doing or asking for things ranging from Q-tips to chewing gum.  I’ll probably take off this weekend to go to Thies, a city of a few hundred thousand that’s only 40 minutes south of here, and then next weekend I’ve planned a trip with Casimir and Trina to St. Louis, a colonial city at the northwest tip of the country.  Being at the house here is great despite the challenges, but all the down time I have on the weekends is a good chance to get away and see some new places given that I spend all my free time during the week with the family.

Some first photos of my time in Mekhe are up here, and I’ve added a few others to my last Dakar album.

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I’ve spent tens of thousands of words with this blog to describe my surroundings, what I’m doing with my time, and my reactions to cultural differences.  But I came to Senegal not simply as an independent observer looking for fun things to do, but also with full knowledge that my experiences lead to personal changes in some way.  I have spent very few words talking about myself in this sense.  So here’s a rundown, from the insignificant to the more substantial, of how I think being in Senegal has affected me so far.

Personal appearance

Unlike ever before, I now have very short hair.  This is partially because I don’t trust barbers who have never used scissors to do a good job on my head, and partially because it’s a little warmer here than back home.  I really like how manageable it is, so unless I’m freezing cold when I get back I’ll likely keep it.  (Then again, I haven’t had a good look at myself in the mirror for weeks, so I’ll probably consult one of those before deciding.)

I’ve also probably lost about five pounds from sweating, not eating practically anything between meals, and filling up quicker due to the heat.  Don’t think I look much different though.

Food

I grew up hardly ever eating red meat, mostly because the rest of my family didn’t eat it and so we never had it in my house.  Here, I basically have to eat what’s served to me; specific dietary requests are very much frowned upon in Senegal, and it’d be especially obnoxious of me to ask a family to specially prepare food for me for weeks on end given that meat is eaten so often here.  I figured that eating red meat here would make me take it up once I got home.  I was wrong.  Not eating it for so long while growing up essentially made me averse to it, and so I’m always happy on nights with fish (somewhat often) or chicken (very rare).  And I’ll be happy not to have to eat it when I get home.

I also have always hated coffee, but my family makes it for me every morning here.  Luckily they use a ton of sugar, milk, and even spices; they (and everyone else) call the mix Cafe Touba, and it’s good, but I imagine I’ll go back to drinking coffee rarely when I get back.

In terms of eating habits, I’m now pretty used to waiting an average of about six hours between large meals.  This is very different than in the US, where I never really have any big meals but continually eat throughout the day.  I’ll probably go back to that habit once I get home; I’m now fine waiting between meals, but I’d still prefer to be doing things the other way.

Health

This doesn’t really fit with the theme of personal change, but I guess if you’re wondering how being here has affected me and how I’ve been then this counts.  I’ve been sick a total of around 15 days, half with a cough/cold and the others with two different fevers.  The cold went away by itself eventually, the first fever seemed to be a bacterial infection and so went away with antibiotics, and the second fever only lasted a day.  Given that I always seem to be sick back home, this has been fine.

In terms of food sicknesses, I’ve been one of the luckier members of the group and haven’t had any extended problems.  Some of my groupmates have started to drink the tap water, but given all the warnings and the problems some of those students have had, I’m sticking to my filter and bottled water.

Language

I was told by many — and continue to be told — that the French spoken in Senegal is unsatisfactory in some way.  I’m not sure what way that is.  Although it’s true that a large percentage of the population doesn’t speak the language, the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis speak it very well.  So my French has gotten a lot better since getting here.  I’m certainly not really near the point of fluency, but I now find myself very comfortable in conversation.  Upon getting to Senegal, every opportunity to speak French was a little daunting.  Now, maybe due to the fact that Wolof has taken the place of French as being completely terrifying, I don’t really think twice about starting to talk to someone in French (and am often happy when I can, if I happen to be in an area without many French speakers).  Being in the habit of speaking so much has made my access to vocabulary much quicker in the course of conversation, and I’ve also learned a lot of new phrase structures.  Unfortunately, though, I’m much more comfortable talking about events than I am about ideas.  So I can easily carry a conversation about how I spent my summer break, for example, but if you ask me to explain some political philosophy I have then I tend to stumble through generic expressions substituting for the vocabulary I don’t know.  Working on that.

In terms of Wolof, I’m better at understanding than I am at speaking.  I can pretty easily get through the customary greetings, which take up to a couple minutes.  But even though I do have a basic level of vocabulary and knowledge of phrasing that’s usually good enough to express some simple ideas, I just haven’t had enough practice yet to formulate sentences quickly enough to engage in a real conversation.  It’s a tough language from a structural standpoint, at least given what I’m used to speaking; for example, rather than conjugating verbs, only their infinitive forms are used.  Instead, the subject pronouns are changed based on the tense and which aspect of the sentence the speaker wants to emphasize (i.e., the subject, the verb, the object, or nothing at all).  Thinking about all that new structure makes it very difficult to form sentences quickly.  Given my basic skills, I can ask people easy questions (what someone’s doing, where they’re going, where they’re from, etc.) and usually pick out a few words from their response to figure out what they’re saying.  I can also respond, quite slowly, to these questions.  With anything more complex, I’m pretty lost; I can’t follow a conversation between two native Wolof speakers in the least.  But it’s been fun to be able to go so quickly from theoretical learning to practical application of knowledge, and hopefully by the end of my time here I’ll be able to hold a short conversation.

Access to information

This one has gone about how you would expect it to.  Given that I now don’t have a phone that tells me the instant I’ve received an email and that I don’t have wireless internet access 24/7, I’ve grown more or less used to being patient about corresponding with people and hearing what’s going on in the world.  Unlike the first few weeks, I don’t really wonder anymore when I’ll be able to get to an internet cafe to check for the one important email I’m waiting for, since I figure that email can wait a couple days.  This reduced access to the rest of the world has been frustrating in some senses, though.  First, I think that having access to essentially unlimited information within finger’s reach increases my own mental abilities in all practical senses.  There’s some interesting work by Andy Clark and David Chalmers I had to read in my Philosophy of the Mind course last semester, which espouses the view that anything we use to remember or access information should be considered part of our mind.  In that sense, I’ve lost a part of my mind in losing this technological access.  Not sure if I would go that far, but I think the basic idea is correct.  But instead of consulting my phone when I’m lost and need directions, for example, now I actually talk to real people.  It was scary at first, but I’ve managed.

The other reason the technological downshift has been a little frustrating is that I still have an unexpectedly strong desire to keep up with the news back home, especially with the ongoing health care reform debate.  I’ve been able to keep track with what’s happening, but at a much slower pace than I’m used to.  And I altogether miss ongoing stories like the balloon kid incident, which is a personal tragedy to be missing out on.  So I’ll be happy to get back home and take up my old habits.

Way of being (?)

The most famous Wolof proverb states, “Ndank ndank mooy japp golo ci naay,” or “Slowly, slowly, one catches the monkey in the countryside.”  Essentially, “Things happen, but be patient.”  My friends and I tend to call this quality of life here ndank ndankness, and I’ve certainly talked plenty about it in this blog.  I’ve adapted to this ndank ndankness to a good extent.  I’m the type who tends to think I’m missing out on something if I’m not doing anything, but being here has made me happy to sit around drinking tea for a couple hours without wondering what I’m missing around me.

There’s also been some decrease in similarly neurotic tendencies about planning future events.  We (or I) tend to think of our lives as pretty regulated, and there’s often a set protocol for planning things.  For example, if I want to go from DC to school in Philly, I need to go online, decide which exact time to leave, and sign up and pay for my train all in advance of my actual departure.  Here, the ad hoc quality of life is entirely clear given the lack of the layer of impersonality that creates the illusion of organization in my life back home.  Before the first real trip I wanted to make, from Dakar to The Gambia, I knew we would have to take a sept-place car and so I went online to see how those worked.  There was nothing — no advanced registration, no central website, not even any information about where we needed to go to get one.  Turned out you just go to a gigantic parking lot and wait until a driver is ready to leave.  So after being here for so long, I’m a lot more willing to allow that things will just work out without too much advanced planning, however long it might take.  If you need to get somewhere within a city, you can probably just stand on a corner and ask the passing buses where they’re going.  If the place you’re going has no address (and most don’t), you just head to the general neighborhood and talk to some people who know some people who know other people who know where your destination is.  If you don’t have anywhere to eat a meal, just stop in a random house near meal time and chances are they’ll have something to feed you.  And so on.

Living in such an environment has also made me much more comfortable with whatever surroundings I find myself in.  Were I to have found myself five months ago in a house in the US similar to my current one here, I would have felt a little ill at ease.  But being here you grow to realize that this type of place, with somewhat worn-down concrete and no pillows on the beds, is much closer to how the majority of the world lives than my house back home.  I hesitate to say that now I really know what poverty is, or anything stupid like that; my family here does pretty well, and I can’t pretend that living for three months in a developing country has entirely transformed my way of seeing the world.  But I’m a lot more comfortable wherever I find myself now.  Like I said, things seem generally to work out.  (I do still find sitting on the floor uncomfortable, though, but I’ve gotten used to it.)

Opinions and ideas

It seems fashionable to come back from an experience abroad, especially one in a developing country, hating America and the West, both what they stand for and their effects on developing countries.  I seem to have missed the boat on this one, as I haven’t formed many of those opinions.  As much as I do enjoy the type of freedom that comes with life here, I’ll be happy to go back to a place where traffic laws are enforced.  Some structure to life is good, and it’s what I’ve grown up being used to having.  If my opinions on our international development politics have changed slightly, though, I think that now I’m a little more open to the idea that the global economy isn’t on an entirely level playing field; it seems odd, for example, to have multilateral institutions recommending (or I guess imposing) free trade practices on developing countries while we keep high import tariffs and agricultural subsidies.  And I can clearly see a lot of the resentment from the academic class here stemming from the opinion that some of the policies put in place during the period of Structural Adjustment in the 1980s left countries like Senegal out to dry in terms of competing on a world stage.

But I also think that a lot of the accusations against the agents of development rest on a set of somewhat odd assumptions.  First is the assumption that life was somehow “better” in the past, before the hegemony of Western culture and business redefined life in a place like Senegal.  You hear this a good amount in the States, too, where cultural conservatives lament some long-lost past.  (See David Brooks’s column this past Monday, for example.)  But what time period, what year, do these people suggest that we go back to?  Should we go back to a time with no trained medical professionals and no education system?  I do often worry about the loss of cultural identity, but ultimately the people here have to make choices for themselves about what to consume.

Second is the assumption that if institutions like the World Bank just stop operating in Senegal, that everyone will go back to happy, simple lives working together on farms, or something like that.  (This is related to the first assumption, but slightly different.)  You hear the phrase “community development” a lot in reference to this, but you never really hear any concrete ideas for what this might mean.  The reality is that the process of development is underway, and I think we can improve people’s lives by continuing forward.  There are a lot of misconceptions about the type of development that economists look to create; people think that economics goes hand in hand with an interest in material wealth above all else.  But ultimately I try to judge wealth in the same terms as the locals judging for themselves.  People really value health care; people value education; and people value economic stability, which comes in part from access to financial services.  And so if we could effect these changes, that would be, to me, real wealth and development.  And the rest will follow from there.  So in the end, I’m still pretty impatient toward people criticizing the motives of the West in its dealings with developing countries.  If we were really trying to push a secret agenda of Western hegemony by giving loans to developing countries, you’d think that more than a tiny handful of the “America-lovin’” Republicans in Congress would have voted in favor of an amendment to the recent war supplemental bill that lent about $5 billion to the IMF.  Not the case.

Students are also big on coming back from trips like this hating materialism and purporting to have figured out what’s really important in life.  However, as I do not live in Plato’s World of Forms, but rather a physical world, I (still) tend to think things are somewhat significant in addition to those really important parts of life.  But I (still) don’t live my life solely based on my need for these things.  So not much change there.  I guess I’ve gotten a little more stingy being here, but that’s more a matter of relative prices than anything else; the knowledge that I can get a good pair of pants makes for $10 makes me think the $20 pair is too expensive.  But once I get back home I’m pretty sure my standards will change back to what they were before and I’ll be willing to spend a lot more than even $20 on that pair of pants because I know I have to.  Also, as much as the focus of life here rests on connections with family and friends, the Senegalese really do like to present themselves well and have nice possessions.  So this wouldn’t be a perfect place to come if you’re looking to be motivated to go back to the US dressed in a canvas bag.

Finally, I’ve been exposed here to an entirely different religious context, with the unique Senegalese brand of Islam visible everywhere.  In response to all this, I think I actually have become less religiously tolerant than I was before.  I don’t think this is the proper forum to ramble about my views on religion, given that it’s open to anyone and under my name, but feel free to contact me personally if you’re curious.  (If you get these posts by email, you can reply directly to the email and I’ll get it.)

 

Anyway, that’s all I can really think of in terms of big categories of how being here has affected me.  There are certainly some miscellaneous other changes, though.  Hopefully I’ve learned something from the much higher level of dancing that everyone seems to pick up by age 3, although I thankfully can’t see myself when put in these situations.  I also never use my left hand for anything anymore, given the cultural tradition.  It’s sort of a shame, since I always thought of myself, likely without reason, as a little bit ambidextrous.  Now I flinch when something touches that hand.  Finally, I think I’ve gotten used to being a real novelty.  Back home, I’m just another Jew (in name at least) who studies economics.  Here, I’m a fascinating presence from a place where gold lines the streets.  And even in the context of my group of American students, I’m one of only a few economics majors, so I think people find my ideas about what we’re seeing pretty interesting.  Not that no one sees me as interesting in the US (I hope), but it’s all given me a different sense of my place.  I have no idea how this will translate to my life upon going home, though.  Whether I’ve changed in that sense, or in any of the others, I’ll really leave up to you to decide.

I am here

In Wolof, the first question asked when meeting or running into someone is “Nanga def?” which essentially translates to “How are you doing?”  The proper response is “Maangi fi,” or “I am here.”  This seems particularly appropriate given that I am, in fact, now here at my internship site, Ngaye Mekhe. After exchanging parting gifts with my family on Tuesday night — I gave them T-shirts, they gave me doughnuts and chocolate spread — I woke up the next morning at 5:30 to begin the next phase of my time here.  I hauled the entirety of my current belongings to school for our 7 am departure at 7:30 am.  (This was still more on time than expected.)  After driving in our bus northeast for a few hours and dropping off Jasper and Lisa, we arrived in Mekhe around midday.  Waly threw my bags at me off the top of the bus and left me at my family’s doorstep with a wave and a smile.  (Once again I find myself lying.  We actually went to my internship site first to meet my supervisor and chat for a half hour or so about my work, and then I went to see where my friend Trina was staying before being left at my new house after a lengthy introduction from Waly.)

The family has been great.  Unlike Trina’s new family and much of the rest of the town, they all speak very good French to complement their Wolof and Pulaar, another local language.  The father, Pa Diop, works for a local microfinance organization (different from mine), and the mother, Ma Sow, just opened a small boutique selling printed fabrics and assorted household items.  Pa Diop has a pretty sober demeanor and gives off a general vibe of seriousness, but after a couple days I would no longer describe him exclusively as such.  He’s very interested in my opinions on American and international politics and loves giving advice to his kids.  In news from the Irrelevant Details Bureau, he’s pretty short.  Ma Sow is not.  She’s unbelievably nice (to be fair, I believe it, but she’s nice nonetheless), and so she calls me “my son” and reminds me from time to time how happy she is that I’m here.  I now have a new Senegalese name, Yoro, which she chose for me within 20 minutes of my arrival.  (It’s a Peul name, since she comes from the Toucouleur ethnic group, which is part of the Peul tribe.)

Then the kids, of which there are nine as of my last count.  Some are children of Pa Diop and Ma Sow, while others are nieces and nephews here for unexplained reasons.  I repeatedly forgot all their names the first day, prompting me finally to pass around a notebook and make them write their names down after many jokes at my expense about my memory.  Save for the 5-year old, Adama, they all speak good French and love talking.  But although Adama is the only one I can’t really communicate with, he’s the one who likes having me there the most.  He ran in the door on the first day when he saw me sitting in front of the TV, and he tends to break into dance in front of me whenever any music is on.  I think he’ll be great for my nascent Wolof abilities, as he often tries to speak to me in Wolof and there are tons of natural translators around the house.  There’s a 19-year old, Demba, who is soft-spoken but quite smart and easy to talk to, and the one I talk to most is 10-year old Cheikh Tidiane, who has endless stories about the past Americans who have stayed with the family.

The house is roughly what I expected, with a few minor differences.  Like most houses here, it’s quite open-air, but most of the house is covered instead of being open to the sky.  The main area is defined by relatively dilapidated concrete flooring and walls, and it includes, of course, a TV set.  I have my own nicely-sized room directly off the main area, and otherwise inside on the first floor there is a boys’ room, a girls’ room, parents’ bedroom, and an unused living room.  (It all sounds bigger than it actually is.)  Then outside is a kitchen, a toilet hole, and a shower.  Finally, the roof is used as a petting zoo for the pet rabbits and pigeons.  The pigeons stay up there, but the rabbits love wandering around the house, often going into my room to hide under the bed.  The kids bring their mattresses up to sleep on the roof with the animals now that the rainy season is done.

I may have made the house sound somewhat simple, but the family is far from poor village folk or anything like that.  There are two computers in the house, one in the parents’ bedroom for Pa Diop to use the internet and the other in the boys’ bedroom for them to play computer games.  We get more TV channels than at my house in Dakar, since there is cable at this house.  And like the Mendy family, everyone speaks French, the parents are well-educated, and the kids aspire to go to college.

More so than the Mendy family, though, the Diops very much engage in the “typical” Senegalese manner of interpersonal interaction.  Every family member who enters the house shakes everyone’s hand upon arrival, so Pa Diop shakes his sons’ and daughters’ hands multiple times daily, which is pretty foreign to me.  A few minutes of every conversation are taken up by greetings, which usually consist of the same question asked multiple times by both parties, with full knowledge of the answer to come.  In French or Wolof:

“How’s it going?”

“It’s going, it’s going.  How’s it going for you?”

“It’s going well.  So how’s it going?”

“It’s going well, it’s going well.  How’s the heat?”

“Oh, it’s going a little, but it’s hot.”

“Yes, it’s always hot here.  And your day?”

“It’s going, it’s going.  Yours?”

“It’s going well.”

And so on, until perhaps you start talking about whatever it is that you wanted to talk about, or the conversation might be over after this exchange.  You are not, under any circumstances, allowed to answer these questions by indicating that something is not going.

In another marked difference from the Catholic Mendy family, the Diops are strict adherents to Islam.  The house pauses to pull out prayer mats at the required times, and the family’s discourse is spattered with Arabic expressions.  Any future event is discussed under the premise that it will happen if God wills it, e.g., “See you tomorrow, insha’Allah,” or “God willing.” And if something is “going,” it is thanks to God, e.g., “It’s going, alhamdoullilahi.”  I guess I should really attribute this to simply being a manner of speech more so than indicating religious adherence, since even the lax Muslims use these expressions.  But it’s clear that it does have something to do with religion, since the Mendys only very rarely wove the expressions into their speech.

Finally, unlike at my last house, all meals are eaten around communal bowls.  I generally get put with Pa Diop, Adama, and the 10-year old girl, Boudy, who seems perhaps to be closest to Pa Diop among the kids.  We eat lunch at a table and dinner on the floor, all with spoons instead of our hands.  The rest of the kids, Ma Sow, and the maid eat together on the floor around a bigger bowl.

Now to the town itself.  The first word I used to describe Dakar upon my arrival was different; the first word I would use to describe Mekhe is desert.  It’s a pretty large town, probably at least three miles wide, but aside from the two main roads it’s all sand.  This is not like the dirt on many Dakar roads; it’s deep sand like you would find at a beach.  Predictably, it is scorching hot; the high today is 98 degrees, and tomorrow’s is 102, which is about 10 degrees hotter than Thies, a city only 30 minutes south of Mekhe.  There’s a stiff breeze today, and so walking down the roads with sun and sand kicking into your face is a relatively blinding endeavor.

The townspeople have all been nice, and the local kids are very excited at the arrival of a toubab.  They often follow me and try to talk to me in Wolof.  There’s a nice big market in the center of town, and Mekhe is also renowned for its leather shoemakers, who make sandals to be shipped all over the world.

Finally, the internship.  My supervisor, Khadi, is a very nice woman who has in mind a project for me to write a report on the general impacts of the local people’s access to loans and savings accounts.  So I’ve written a questionnaire, and starting next week I’ll be going around with the credit agents to administer it to the women in the surrounding villages.  The organization gives out both group and individual loans, mostly to women, although there are some men in their clientele.  The group loans require no collateral, since doing it in a group essentially entails every member cosigning for the others.  Individual loans usually do require collateral in the form of property (e.g., land or furniture).  All loans require savings on the part of the client — initially, 10% of the total loan amount in the case of groups, and 25% for individuals, and further installments are made with every monthly loan repayment.  This serves as insurance in the case of default, and it is also meant to eventually allow the client to have enough savings so as to no longer need to borrow.  But it also likely excludes the poorest local residents from borrowing, as they might not have enough money to save the required amount to secure a loan.  That required savings cannot be touched by the client until a few months after the loan is repayed, and if a new one is taken out then they build on top of what they have in that account (and once again can’t touch the money).  There are also normal savings accounts available.  Interest for the loans runs at a pretty hefty 15% yearly, while the savings accounts return 2% interest yearly to the clients.

I’ll hopefully have more to report about the work being done here once I get to start visiting the local women and talking to them (or talking through an interpreter to them, for the ones who only speak Wolof).  Khadi was a little distressed that the scope of FDEA’s operations aren’t bigger, but they do seem to be doing very good work.  They have tens of thousands of loan recipients throughout Senegal, and instead of being donor-driven, they finance their operations through investors and break even despite the high rates of default.  And even if the loans aren’t going to the poorest of the poor, the loan amounts are certainly small change by the standards of normal bank loans.  A normal first loan for an individual, for example, runs around $100 to be repaid over the course of a few months.  The loans can get into the range of a couple thousand dollars, but only for clients or groups who have taken out multiple loans.   Those are repaid over the course of a couple years.

And the building is quite nice, albeit small.  I’m currently sitting in the room of a credit agent who’s on vacation, using his internet.  There are only four other employees here, plus the driver who hangs out until someone needs to go somewhere and the guard who makes me tea every afternoon.  So most of the operations are done in the field, which is where I’ll be for the majority of my time.

More, obviously, to come soon.

(New pictures from last weeks in Dakar are now up.)

Kër Mendy

The whole premise of a blog like this is that people back home care enough about the minor, often mundane, details about my life and my thoughts for me to take time to share them.  I know that the majority of the site’s 1400 visits have probably come from my parents reloading the page multiple times a day, but I’m going to interpret (or misinterpret) them as indicating that the blog’s premise is correct.  So for the 1400 minor detail lovers, this post is for you.  I figure that given that I’m about to leave Dakar, posting about my house and host family one more time is ironic enough to be appropriate.

Further than that, I think that describing my house and my family here does give a good idea of what it is to live with any upper-middle class family in Senegal, which is expectedly totally different than in the U.S.  So I hope you can generalize from the specific information I give here to get some idea of the way of life I’ve been exposed to during my time in Senegal.

So first, here’s a bird’s eye diagram I just made online of  kër Mendy, or in English, the Mendy household:

Hopefully that’s all pretty self-explanatory.  (If you need a primer or want to refresh your memory about the members of the family, see this post.)  As is clear from the diagram, the house has only one level.  Like most other houses here, it’s is very open-air, and so there’s no room that connects to another room indoors.  Everything, instead, leads outdoors.  My room, for example, opens onto a covered outdoor hallway, and the three main bedrooms and the main room open out onto the back porch.  There’s no real separation between the outdoor dining area and the backyard, but they’re on different levels — hence the line and the steps.  Every part of the house, inside and outside, is tiled.

It’s likely that the diagram doesn’t give any idea what the house is actually like — in fact, my friend Trina just looked over my shoulder and said as much — and so here are a bunch of pictures to help guide your imagination:

Mami posing ridiculously in front of the house, with small shop to the right

Main room looking from near front door (taken during lunch party -- Vu's face is absurd)

Other side of main room, from front door

Back eating area, from backyard

Kitchen opening out into backyard, during the rain

Picture of my room from lower bunk of other bed

Bad picture of hallway when turning right out of my room, looking out on laundry lines in backyard

Most of the family’s time is spent in the main room watching TV or hanging around talking very quickly in Wolof.  Mère Vitou usually lays out on the small sofa, while the rest of the family is distributed across the giant couch (which fits five) and the floor.  People really don’t mind sitting on the floor here; the maids do so when not working, Ester (a daughter of Mère Vitou) almost always does it, and Mami and Michou (the kids) usually do as well.  When the kids play their board game (Ludo), it’s usually in this main room on the floor, although sometimes out back.  Once lunch is over, the main room becomes the place to be in the house, as the TV stays on from then until people go to sleep sometime after midnight.

Before lunch, though, most of the activity is out back.  The day starts out there, as Sally, the main maid, does the previous day’s dishes by hand and scrubs the floor while Mère Vitou walks back and forth to exercise her feet before eating breakfast around nine.  When the laundry ladies come every Wednesday morning, they do their work by hand in big buckets right next to the bathroom near my room.  Then, as the morning moves on, most of the cooking takes place in the kitchen (and in related news, the sky is blue), although there are a few tasks done right outside the kitchen.  After eating her breakfast in her chair to the side of the dining table, Mère Vitou peels some onions or separates leaves of vegetables while talking to whomever else is out back.  Meanwhile, Ester helps Sally with preparing the meat outside the kitchen, and most of the mortar-and-pestling of spices takes place there.  Finally, all meals — save Mère Vitou’s dinner, which is served to her while watching TV — are eaten at the table in the covered dining area out back.

The one other place people hang out is in front of the house, but most of these people are Jean-Jacques (the 20-something son) and his friends.  They stay out there from afternoon until the early hours of the morning, smoking cigarettes and playing cards in near silence on a table across the street from the house.  Whatever card game they play is horribly convoluted, and I don’t smoke, so I’ve never really spent much time with them.  Instead, I usually pass my nights hanging out in the neighborhood, visiting the houses of the program members I live near and stopping in the boutiques where I know the shopkeepers.  Every night, the 20-year old shopkeeper next to my friend Jon’s house makes ataya for anyone who stops in, so I often make my way there for a cup or two.  It’s a very friendly neighborhood, and I’ve never felt unsafe in the least.

Back to the house, though.  I guess the only part that’s left is the bedrooms.  Mine is pretty self-explanatory, but the larger bedroom is not.  I think that in that room, Suzanne sleeps in a big bed with her two kids while Ester sleeps in a smaller bed off to the side.  But “think” is the operative word there.  Every bedroom was just recently fitted with a ceiling fan; there is, of course, no air conditioning.  And as is done throughout Senegal, everyone sleeps above their sheets with no blanket.

That’s all I can think of for the house.  I also indicated that I’d update you with my new knowledge of the family, gleaned mostly from talking to the kids and Mère Vitou and having some time to observe everything.  I should say that Mami is, like many kids seven years old, something close to a pathological liar; she’s told me that the family was moving to the U.S., for example, and that I would be sharing my bed at certain points with other cousins.  The family is still here and the cousins, thankfully, don’t seem to exist.  So I hope whatever information came from her isn’t as crazy as these stories, and I’ve tried to confirm most of what she’s said with Mère Vitou.  Most of what I’ve learned has been pretty scattered in terms of subject, so I’ll just go through things bullet by bullet:

• There is a decided tension between Pa Mendy and the rest of the family.  No one says a word to him for weeks on end, and no one seems to have any idea where he goes every day after getting pretty dressed up.  He returns at about 10 every night and sits out back listening to the radio by himself until he goes to bed in his own room.  I have no idea the real origins of this separation, but I do know that the small store next door is an issue of contention between him and the rest of the family.  Against the wishes of Mère Vitou, he made that space, which was once where Mère Vitou sold clothes that she made, into a little shop.  But even though it’s owned by the family, the rest of the family still pays for whatever they buy there.  Mère Vitou called him “crazy” for it all.
• The family has very distributed origins.  Two of Mère Vitou’s grandparents settled in Senegal after moving from Portugal for reasons she couldn’t explain, meaning the family isn’t entirely Senegalese by origin.  The rest of the family comes from an area called Casamance, which is south of The Gambia.  Casamance is supposedly beautiful, but due to the separatist movement there, people like me are discouraged from traveling to see it.  Although there’s been some intermarriage between ethnic groups in the family’s history, the family mostly comes from the Mandinka tribe.  There’s not much I can tell you about that group other than that it makes up roughly a tenth of Senegal’s population and that the name Mandinka refers to the language they speak.  But given the “Wolofization” of Senegal — about 35% of Senegal is Wolof, but over 90% speak the language — and given that the family lives in a big city, I’m pretty sure they all can only speak Wolof (along with French).  The family originally came to Dakar for the same reason that Mère Vitou’s grandparents moved from Portugal: unknown.  It probably had to do with finding work, though, from what she says.
• The family, as I said, is Catholic.  They go to Mass on Sundays and cross themselves before meals.  Mère Vitou often holds onto prayer beads during breakfast.  There are some framed pictures of Jesus and his disciples throughout the house.  Not much else to report about their religious practices.  It is interesting, though, to see the interaction of their Catholicism with the general cultural context of Islam, as nearly 95% of the Senegalese are Muslim.  As I previously mentioned, they take part in celebrating Muslim holidays like Korité, not by praying (obviously), but by hosting the traditional parties associated with them.  The kids say it’s just because they like to have parties, but it’s also pretty clear that they do want to fit in with the culture that surrounds them.
• Some traditions predating monotheism’s arrival here do still exist even in this generally modern family.  They engage in a ritual in which they “make their dead speak” before burying them.  I’ve still been unable, for the most part, to figure out what this means, since whenever I ask they tend to define the phrase using the terms comprising it.  (“Making the dead speak?  Well, it essentially means laying the deceased out in nice clothes and making them speak.”)  Every morning, as Pa Mendy is walking down the steps to the backyard on his way out of the house for the day, he pours out a tiny bit of water before taking his first sip.  One of my professors tells me this is so that his ancestors may drink before he does.  Similarly, dirty dishes aren’t washed at night; as I said above, Sally does them all the next morning.  They probably do this out of practice more so than out of strict observance to the old tradition, but that tradition stems from wanting to leave some food on the dirty plates for ancestors to eat before washing them.
• Suzanne works at the airport, sometimes doing the overnight shift.  Not sure what exactly she does, but as is common with working Senegalese women, she puts on a  straight-haired wig and a ton of makeup before heading out.  Her sister Binette works at DHL, which is right next to WARC, where I take classes.  Ester doesn’t seem to work.
• Mami is essentially equivalent to Junior as her real name is the same as Mère Vitou’s (I’m pretty sure).  Michou is a diminutive of Michel.
• The family certainly isn’t horribly rich, but they do have the means to live quite comfortably by Senegalese terms.  The heads of the family had steady jobs in the formal sector of the economy, and three of the daughters do now, which is quite unusual in a country with a lack of steady jobs and whose economy is run by its informal sector.  The most obvious manifestation of the family’s decent wealth is that the house is continually being improved upon.  Like I said, fans were recently installed in every room; my room just got a new cabinet; the family just bought a gigantic freezer to replace the second refrigerator they previously had; the backyard tiles were just redone; and the two couches’ leather coverings were just replaced, to name a few improvements over the short time span I’ve been here.  Further, Ester is quite heavy, and the kids aren’t so skinny either, which is taken as a positive sign of living well.  And there are always three maids around, which is certainly more than average.   More so than those physical realities, though, the family’s culture underlines their somewhat elite status.  Less than 30% of the country speaks French (less than 5% of women), but everyone in the family speaks fluently.  Ester’s two teenage kids go to school in France, and Olga, Honorine’s daughter, goes to college there.  And they have typically French names; notice any difference between my given Senegalese name, Souleymane Diop, and, for example, Jean-Jacques Mendy?  So although the family members certainly identify with their Senegalese roots, it’s also clear they value success and associate with Western culture both as a means to this end and as an end in itself, whatever the reason may be.

Questions welcome…I’m sure I forgot some things.  In terms of my life here, my time in Dakar is quickly winding down.  The kids in my house have gone back to school, so the house is much quieter both during the day and at night, since they now go to bed by 9:30 or 10.  My classes end this Friday, and then after a weekend of running errands and packing, I’ll be taken up north to Ngaye Mékhé, my internship site and a town of about 15,000, on a bus with some of the other students going in the same direction for their internships.  I start my six weeks of work with my microfinance organization, Femme Développement Entreprise en Afrique, on Thursday the 29th.  The only other person in my group going to Mékhé (as it’s often referred to) is Trina, and she’ll be working in another microfinance institution.  I just found out that the father of the family I’ll be staying with is Trina’s supervisor, so I’m guessing the family speaks French.  That’ll certainly make communication easier, although I hope I’ll be able to somewhat improve upon my beginner Wolof skills by forcing them to bear with me as I stutter my way through simple sentences.  The family name is Diop, so I’m sure they’ll have a field day with my Senegalese name.

So it’s likely that this is my last post from Dakar, at least until I return for my last couple weeks here in December.  I’ll try to update when I get settled in Mékhé, but I don’t expect I’ll be able to find an internet connection outside of an internet cafe, making consistent posting much harder.  (And I had such a good streak going the past few days.)  Hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about my time here as much as I’ve enjoyed writing about it.