If You Jump, I Jump
Emily Ford
July 9, 2013
Every muscle in my body was taut with terror. My legs trembled and the pole on which I was perched shook along with them. Sucking air deep within my chest, I closed my eyes to the ground 20 feet below. I was frozen for an unbearable and indeterminable amount of time until that recurrent thought...
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The Sparknotes Version
Emily Ford
April 23, 2013
In a true testament to the pace of Senegalese life, I have read my fair share of books while here. Autobiographies, fiction, anthropological research. Some, forcing myself to finish, while others I excitedly sped through. But none have been quite as challenging yet enthralling as the one that has encompassed the past seven months: a...
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A Senegalese Snapshot
Emily Ford
February 28, 2013
In December I began writing a blog about the roles of Senegalese men, a highly critical piece condemning their absence and consequent effect within the family. Yet during the drafting process, a friend in the village confided in me he would no longer be able to come home from school because he could not afford the transportation fare (the...
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What the Bugs Gave Me
Emily Ford
January 9, 2013
Bugs. Of shapes and sizes I didn’t couldn’t have imagined to be biologically possible. This is my first memory of my village. It was reaching dusk as I sat down on a mat in this unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers, when the hordes appeared. Cockroaches scurried from cracks in cement; beetles dug themselves out of the sand, and oddly...
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Waste Not, Want Not
Emily Ford
November 29, 2012
The singular light bulb in my room went out. No big deal, I thought. It was late in the evening when I noticed and I didn’t want to disturb my family. Using my flashlight, I simply went to sleep, vowing to ask for a light bulb the next morning. However I didn’t remember until I returned home from...
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Dafa Metti
Emily Ford
November 29, 2012
I find myself wishing for rougher hands so that I wouldn’t wince from the heat of the rice as I eat. I want my spine to be perfectly aligned to avoid the sore back I endure after spending hours picking bissap. And I curse my eyes for being so sensitive that they tear up from the smoke as I...
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A Village of Their Own
Emily Ford
October 23, 2012
1993. A special year for planet Earth, for I was brought into this world. It also happens to be the year my host sister, Daba, was born. I seemingly won the geographic lottery by being born in the U.S., while the cosmic forces fated that Daba should be dropped down in the village of Medina...
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Senegalese Enough
Emily Ford
September 21, 2012
After a week in the bustling yet somehow insanely sandy (seriously, where does it all come from?!) city of Dakar, I transferred homestays. I left a large, loud Wolof family where I was surrounded by constant, indecipherable movement to be transferred into a quiet, Christian, and very Western home. It felt refreshing to be in a place so calm...
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Darkness
Emily Ford
September 7, 2012
Every time I have constructed a mental globe over the past 10 days, my mind, Google Maps style, zooms into the western most coast of Africa. Yet instead of the envisioning my future home, Senegal has been blacked out. All I see is darkness. When I hear the anecdotes from past Senegal fellows, I have...
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Full Feeling
Emily Ford
July 10, 2012
As I sit in my compact dorm room at boarding school in Indiana, my three roommates watch, entertained yet baffled, my interactions with my Indian host family over Skype. It has been a year since our tear-stained, poignant departure after a summer immersion/service program where I first understood the meaning of “full feeling”. The simple...
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