Boundou Kodi

Just returned from Kedougou, Eastern Senegal, last night, after suffering a bus ride the lasted from 5 AM to 1 AM the next morning and traversing miles and miles of unpaved, rocky roads. It's too easy to go to a different place and say your life is changed. But after Kedougou, I know that my perspective is widened.

I stayed in the rural village of Boundou Kodi for three nights and four days. Je suis restée avec the chief of the village, Mamadi, probably 70 years old or so. Mamadi has four wives. Souleyeman, his oldest son, has two, and other of Mamadi's sons and daughters have wives with children. Needless to say, there were upwards of 25 kids who lived at the same compound as me. The architecture of the place was simple enough: 11 huts, cement and circular, with pointed, thatched roofs. Each wife has her own hut, and the children sleep wherever there's a bed.

Several times during those days, I had to actively stop myself from remembering those commercials we see on TV in the United States. Donate to this or that organization, just 20 cents a day, to feed this barefoot, dirty, hungry kid in Africa. In the comfort of our homes, we munch on potato chips, reclining horizontally on the couch, as the TV screen sneers with the footage of big-eyed children. They're dusty, cut-up; they have yellow eyes. From those sad commercials, I had gleaned that poverty equals misery.

So, I was challenged to diagnosis these mostly uneducated, maladied kids as POOR when they were laughing, singing, dancing, and happily braiding my hair. I taught them the hokey-pokey, and from then on, I'd hear demands to "faire okey-okey" many times a day. Under the stars at night, one of the kids would invariably whisper "chante," and I'd sing "You are my sunshine," "Itsy Bitsy Spider," or I'd draw on my extensive Beatles repertoire if I was feeling adventurous. With those kids, it was big, toothy smiles all around.

As a result of this ongoing singing and dancing extravaganza at Boundou Kodi, I successfully avoided internalizing the poverty of the place for the first days I was there. But around the same time that "okey-okey" started getting old, I began to really notice the maladies-- infected wounds, bad teeth, jaundiced eyes-- and the bigger maladies: the shoddy education system, the lack of healthcare. And everything started to resemble those remembered commercials from home-- the ones I'd watch from our green couch in the living room.

Now that je suis rentrée à Dakar, I don't know how to marry that experience to my life quotidienne. How do I contextualize my time in Boundou Kodi, which already feels other-worldly, with the realities of finding an internship for the summer and getting into my classes at Kenyon next year? It's a fact that I will soon be back in the U.S., and I will watch TV, and before long, I will be confronted with one of those commercials, asking me to give to children that remind me of kids I've known. And the question I want answered: what is the best way to give? Yes, after all this, I'm asking the same question I've always asked, the same question everyone else is asking. How can one person make a difference?