Musings
So the time is drawing near where I will have to make a decision: do I stay or do I go? And how come someone who is normally so decisive is in this quandary, anyway? When I first came on board, I made it quite clear to my bosses that I would stay for two years and then leave – after all, besides the fact that I do not have hot water, there is also no 401 K option here, and certainly no extra money to put away for the proverbial rainy day.
I was so culture-shocked when I first arrived. Not only did I hate the daily morning call to prayer at 5:45 a.m. or so and the lack of sidewalks anywhere, but I was paranoid about mosquitoes (I have given up the Mefloquin and sleep without a net), I was paranoid about the vegetables (the worst case of the runs I had was when I tried using bleach to wash my veggies), I was paranoid about the stray animals, I was paranoid about street crime, and in a conversation with my mother I recently established several important things:
Spellbound
Talkin’ Trash
One of the first things to strike any visitor to Dakar will be the amount of garbage everywhere. People throw garbage unapologetically on the ground, in the street, in the sand, in the water; it is everywhere and anywhere. The two major types of ‘waste removal’ systems that exist here seem to be either burning refuse or sending it out to sea. One gorgeous road along the ocean has a ditch leading off of it; the ditch is chock full of old chlorine bottles, dishwashing liquid bottles and assorted other plastics of all kinds. When the tide comes in, it quietly and unostentatiously makes all the trash disappear. As is the case throughout most of the very populous Third World, the locals do not tend to think much about trash, as they have more pressing concerns, but holidaymakers understandably find it unappetizing to repose on a beach full of refuse or do the breast stroke in water that is full of plastic bags or juice cartons.Thankfully, however, there are idealists out there who instead of booking the next flight out to a more pristine kind of place are trying both to sensitize and empower the locals, and with great success. The concept behind the Solid Waste Management Project is deceptively simple: what happens when you first provide people in a community with waste containers, educate them on the advantages of recycling and composting versus the disadvantages of polluting, and then show them how the resulting organic fertilizer can even yield a small profit? It sounds too good to be true, but the phenomenal thing is that the Joal recycling project, which began as a six month pilot project, will soon have spread to six of 27 neighborhoods in the region.
The award-winning NGO Tostan, brainchild of Molly Melching, initially financed the pilot project (this story, too, is worth telling: on a flight between NY and CA, Molly Melching gave up the comfort of business class to sit in economy, hence saving $5,500, the very money that Tostan then used to fund the pilot project. Just goes to show that a little thrift can go a long way!) Tostan has also paid for a feasibility study to be conducted to see if the waste project can be expanded to the areas of Mbour and Thies. Impressed by the success of the project, both the World Wildlife Fund and the US Embassy have committed to help finance further recycling initiatives.
A Nobel Endeavor
If you have never heard of this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, J.M.G. Le Clézio, don’t be too hard on yourself, as his body of work (over 40 novels!) was virtually out of print in English until news of the prize hit the headlines. At the age of 23, Le Clézio wrote his first novel, The Interrogation, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and has continued to be honored for his work ever since, with thirteen percent of French readers voting him the greatest living French writer in 1994.I managed to learn all this just before leaving for the bookstore Quatre Vents in nearby Mermoz, where he and a fellow writer with arresting dark curls named Hubert Haddad, winner of a major 2008 prize in Francophone literature for his book called Palestine, had agreed to a question-and-answer session with our students (a session, which, unfortunately, was dominated by pedantic teachers asking tripartite questions – you know, the kind that take longer to ask than to answer. While I am on a rant, let me not forget to mention the teacher who answered her ringing cell phone midway through the event, because all of us in the vicinity of course preferred to have a share in planning her evening than hear these eminent writers talk about their craft..!).
To return to Le Clézio: he was raised bilingually (his father was a Mauritius-born British doctor), spending his childhood in Mauritius and Nigeria and his adolescence in Nice, which may help to explain the omnipresence of sunlight and the sea in his work. As an adult, he traveled extensively, earning a doctorate in early Mexican history and teaching in Korea and Thailand as well as living with the Embera-Wounaan tribe in Panama, so that he may justly be called a citizen of the world.
