Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Thoughts from the field on education and development

Over the last few weeks, it has started to occur to me just how much I take basic information that we learn in elementary school for granted. I never realized before I came here how when you talk to somebody in America, you automatically assume they have an education level of a certain degree, which is an easy assumption since it is illegal to drop out before you have at least reached high school. Here though, I often find myself trying to have certain conversations before stopping myself and realizing that I need to back up- a lot. This morning, I was out in the field chatting with Pape about time zone differences- that if I call my family when it is 11 am here, I will certainly be waking them up since it is 6 am over on the American eastern seaboard. Somehow he ended up asking a question of direction- so if Banjul is in this direction (points south) and if Dakar is in this direction (points northwest) then where is America? I have been continuously trying to explain that America is a very large country in comparison to Senegal and hoping that it will click and they were remember at some point seeing it on a map and remember that-oh yeah- it actually is rather big. It never occurred to me that maybe they have not even seen a map of the world before. I asked Pape if he had, and he replied that no, in fact he had never seen a map of the world before. This man is about 35 years old. In all my attempts to explain that America is a very large country and you can’t simply describe what the weather is like over there in a short statement, it somehow slipped my mind that I took for granted the fact that as you go north in the world it gets colder because of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun, or the fact that there is more than just water that separates Africa from America- there is an ocean there. Also, airplanes move quite fast. If I am in an airplane for 8 hours versus a bush taxi for 8 hours, I will get much farther in an airplane. Telling them how long the flight is will not exactly convey the distance of the trip.

There is a whole slew of other things I often take for granted about talking to people with a certain level of education that I have only just started to think about after half a year in this country. Literacy, which I’ve mentioned before, is a big one. It doesn’t quite occur to you just what the implications are of not being able to read until you try to work with these people on a daily basis. People keep asking me to teach them English, assuming they know what that entails. I now respond by asking if they can read. Often, they say they can’t, and now I have to try to explain to them the importance of writing down words and reading them over in order to memorize them or understand the necessity of a pronoun and an article. When they go to the doctor, they receive a small slip of paper similar to the ones we get on appointment cards saying when to return- those are rather futile if they can’t be read. Lately, we’ve been watching TV in Arame’s room since the AC/DC converter has been working at night, but I wonder how it interests them so much if they can’t understand the majority of what is going on when the news is all in French. The other night, an American action movie came on (I don’t know what it was but it took place on a cruise ship which is hard enough to explain as it is) and it was dubbed over in French. At one point, a woman in the movie went to a stage and started singing and the dubbing went away, so that she was speaking in French but singing in English, and I laughed at the irony of it. Almost all 20 people in the room with me turned around and wondered why I was laughing- many of the children don’t know that white people speak more than one language, too. The other problem was that this movie came on right after a news reel about a demonstration parade in Dakar involving thousands of people walking down the street holding signs and marching bands playing. For someone who has never been out of the village life, how to you distinguish between the reality of this gigantic mass of people on paved streets surrounding by tall buildings in this country and the American action film that followed it?

I’ll leave my education rant there to comment on the consequences; in short, development cannot progress without education. You don’t really notice it until you’ve been living here a while- as you try to talk about abstract concepts, technology, or the outside world, things simply go over many peoples’ heads and they lose interest or assume you are trying to speak Wolof and don’t know what you are saying. On the bright side, education is actually a large part of Senegal’s overall development strategy. The other day, Ousman told me that when he was a kid here in Keur Andalla, there was no school, and he had to travel to go to elementary school all the way up through university. Now, almost every village in the general vicinity has a French elementary school in it or within walking distance. Ousman and I both agreed that over time, the general level of literacy and education in the villages will start to increase as the current generation begins to mature. The school here, after all, was built less than 10 years ago, so the current adult generation is mainly uneducated. Even if they never progress to middle school and high school, the ability to read and write a little bit and perform basic arithmetic will make a world of difference within the next generation or two. Especially with the extension of infrastructure such a electricity and water availability that permit more widespread use of technology such as cellphones, television and internet, people will begin to see the necessity of education and understand the concept of globalization. Inshallah.

I am, after all, posting this thought to the internet for the world to see from my cozy little hut in Africa. That has not yet ceased to amaze me.

Love from the Sahel,

~E

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