Facets of a Nation

Seydou and Me

Early Thursday morning, two familiar faces greeted me at the airport in Dakar: Hassana Diallo, my lifeline for all things Senegal, and Seydou Diallo, a cousin from Dindefelo.*  Hassana was my Team Leader as a Global Citizen Year Fellow 2012-2013, and he played a key role in helping me develop my Davis Projects for Peace Proposal.***
*Dindefelo--a village of about 1400 people in the Kedougou** region in southeast Senegal.
**Kedougou is also a small city about 35 km from Dindefelo.  I'll travel there by car or bike to buy supplies and for internet access. 
***Here is the link to my project proposal, which I will execute over the next three months.  

Here in Dakar, I am staying with Hassana, his wife Mariama, and Seydou in the home of the Peace Corps Director of Senegal.  In this house, maybe more accurately called a mansion, wifi abounds, boxes of cornflakes line kitchen shelves, and the air-conditioning unit in my room offers complete climate control.  I'm still FaceTime-ing American friends and snapchat-ing things like a Sprite soda can with an Arabic label.  In a way, I feel like I'm cheating because the Senegal I relate to most, where I previously spent most of my time, is more than 700 km away from here in Dindefelo, where I will have little access to the amenities of my life at home.  In Dindefelo, a basic cell phone suffices for communication and the place I take most comfort in is a little, round mud hut.

But, Dakar too is Senegal. It can be as similar to home as watching Sports Center with a gyro in hand (dinner last night) and as different as passing families dining together on the sidewalk while their mothers sell small sacks of peanuts.


Yesterday, Seydou and I went to neighborhood called Medina to find Kedougou youth.  Though can only confirm that this exists for Kedougou, my guess is that there are pockets of young men from different regions in Senegal living in Medina and the surrounding neighborhoods to attend Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD), which enrolls 60,000 students from all over West Africa.  In search of friends from Dindefelo, we climbed several flights of dormitory like housing.  We went up and down the stairs half a dozen times while Seydou made phone calls to find them. We finally happened upon someone--Sekou.  I'd never met him but we made the connection that one of his cousins was a student in my art class last year, and another cousin is a good friend of mine.  

We spent a couple of hours with Sekou in the military-stye, bunk-bed configured room.  More Kedougou kids trickled in.  Seeing them all again relieved my exhaustion from the heat (relative to Ohio spring temperatures) and from constantly speaking Pulaar after so long.