If You Jump, I Jump

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…

09 July, 2013

The Sparknotes Version

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…

23 April, 2013

A Senegalese Snapshot

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…

28 February, 2013

What the Bugs Gave Me

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…

09 January, 2013

Waste Not, Want Not

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…

29 November, 2012

Dafa Metti

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…

29 November, 2012

A Village of Their Own

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…

23 October, 2012

Senegalese Enough

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….

21 September, 2012

Darkness

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…

07 September, 2012

Full Feeling

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…

10 July, 2012