Back from Vacation

Hello all,

I returned to my village on Tuesday after spending about two and a half weeks in America with my family and friends. Now I enter the home stretch.

It was strange though. When I left America last March, I always envisioned it in my mind as being exactly as I'd left it. While I knew in my head that this was not the case, there wasn't that visceral understanding until I arrived at my house. Upon my return, I was immediately struck by the wide disparity between the US and Senegal in terms of abundance of things. The day after I got in, we went to one of those "big-box" stores to buy some supplies, and I thought to myself that the meat section alone could have fed my entire village for at least a year, if not more. We have so much abundance in America, and we are so wasteful with it, that it can be downright disheartening at times.

But that is only natural. As they say, "out of site- out of mind." Just as I didn't get that visceral understanding of how things are always changing, even when you're not present to witness the changes, people won't have that visceral awareness of their relative prosperity until they witness the poverty experienced elsewhere. I was surprised (though not necessarily happy) at how quickly I was able to get back into the old routine and get re-acclimated to the US lifestyle. While I was there, Senegal and my village seemed like a dream. Now that I'm back, I am once again confronted with the realities of my village and living in the third world, and it is America that seems like a dream.

I am looking forward to a period of frenetic activity. A large proportion of rural Senegal consists of subsistence farmers, who grow crops like millet, corn, beans, sorghum, and peanuts. During the farming season, which ranges from late-May until mid-November, the farmers have time for little else beyond working in their fields. My work is predicated on working with people. When they don't have time to work with me, I cannot do any work. Thus, during the farming season, my work activity decreases a bit. This lack of activity can be somewhat difficult to tolerate. It is important for me to be in my village and I go and interact with people, but ultimately it is the work that brought me here and the lack of it during the farming season makes things somewhat boring. This is not a bad thing, because ultimately the people need to feed themselves and that should be foremost in their minds. But the periods of boredom can be pretty hard to deal with. But we are reaching the end of the farming season, and the next few months should (hopefully) be quite busy workwise.

On my way back from America, I took advantage of my eight hour layover in Paris by going into the city and walking around in the Jardin de Tuileries. It was somewhat weird, to be honest. While it was a garden, full of plants, it was all in perfect order, kind of like a painting. But by no means was it representative of nature. Nature is disorder, entropy (people who've studied physics or chemistry will know what I'm talking about). But I suppose humans do their best to carve out some semblance of order in the world to make their lives easier. Anyways, I'm rambling.

Until next time...