Adventures at a School Newspaper Festival

March 30, 2008

Let me begin by telling you that just the getting to the ‘Festival International des Journaux Lyceens’ here was an adventure. As the nominal advisor of our school’s student newspaper, I found myself crammed into a dilapidated taxi with 5 students and a driver in quarters so claustrophobically close that the NYC Board of Ed would have had me up on charges of something or other in a heartbeat. On the way in, we saw a white TATA bus collide with a colorful car rapide and then were ourselves stopped by a policeman because our driver did not respect another car’s priority in a roundabout.

The driver’s papers were taken and I thought we might have to offer money in order to get them back, but my students warned me against ever trying to do this; if the policeman was not on the take, I could find myself in some hot water. Thankfully, while busy scrutinizing paperwork, the same officer completely missed the fact that we had an illegal number of passengers in the car – we were ’surcharge’, as they say, as cars in Senegal so frequently are.Students, perhaps 200 or so from schools in the Dakar area, gathered to examine different aspects of journalism in smaller workshops. They were accompanied by their teachers, mainly men, some in sport shirts, some in boubous, plus me, so it was a colorful mix.

During orientation, the teachers were told about the computers and bathroom facilities available for their use as well as the lieux de priere, just in case I’d forgotten that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, but in a Muslim country where people will stop whatever they are doing, wherever they are in order to do their ablutions and say their prayers.

The workshop I sat in on was on reporting, and it took me a moment to realize that the ‘cinq W’s’ to which the workshop leaders were referring were our own, namely the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ of newspaper writing. (Needless to say none of these words – qui, quoi, comment - begins with a ‘w’ in French, which is why it took a bit longer to register that this was indeed what they were talking about). As a concrete example they discussed the situation at a local university called Cheikh Anta Diop, where students have been on strike for over a month and a half because of terrible overcrowding (some students listen to lectures from outside the windows, unable even to see the professor) and not enough instructors. Administrators at the university, including the rector, concede that the students have a point, but the responsible government officials have staunchly refused to receive the student representatives who want to air their grievances.

The focus of the writing workshop, however, was not on the issue of the strike so much as on the reporting of it, of course: How can one faithfully recount the chain of events? How did the strike come about? How many students participated? What were they wearing? Avoid the use of the imperfect and conditional tenses, we were instructed (hooray, always got them mixed up anyway, particularly in those pesky if-clauses!), along with the use of medical or legal jargon; keep your language simple and accessible, and of course it always helps to love what you are doing. Good advice, I thought!

As the group leaders spoke, I took notes – not on what was being said, as I tuned out after a while, but on what the kids and teachers around me were wearing. There were boys in polo shirts and Bob Marley T-shirts, girls with headscarves, girls in sundresses and dangly earrings, and some administrators in more traditional Senegalese garb. The students were interested and well behaved for the most part, participating nicely and taking notes; I found myself looking longingly out the window more often than they, perhaps because I am still trying to adjust to the endlessly beautiful weather, particularly now that it has become comfortably pleasant as opposed to excruciatingly hot.

The high point was lunch, when my kids and I ducked out to have pizza at a local chain called Caesar’s. As always, with the toubab schoolteacher in tow we made for a conspicuous group, but it made for a nice sense of community. It is hard to believe that I have now been here for almost a full academic year, and that all the exotic names that at first seemed so impossible to remember, from Rokhaya and Serigne to Aissatou and Madjiguene, are now inextricably bound up with the individual talents and personalities of my students – some are shy, some witty, and a good number are ‘partisans du moindre effort‘ (why work harder, work smarter - see previous article Conseil de Classe).

But the journey we are taking together is so unbelievable – a quest for knowledge, intercultural understanding, the pursuit of a limitless horizon – that I daresay that despite occasional frustration on both sides we have left indelible impressions on one another’s minds and hearts. And this is, after all, why I came.

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com