Two steps forward

Life is starting to feel busy. This is quite reassuring to my latent Protestant workaholic streak but also a reminder that I could learn something from the Senegalese predilection to just let life happen instead of trying to push it along at full force. A colleague who recently returned from India reminded me that Americans are the only people in the world who worry about whether or not they are working hard enough. Senegalese certainly work hard but "Let go and let God" could be the motto around here. Things happen when they happen. But lest you get too lazy, Wolof speakers will remind you "Yalla yalla bey sa tool", i.e. believe in God but plant your field.

There are lots of small shoots coming up in my research field. Tomorrow I will renew my contact with the executive director of an organization here that focuses on advocacy and outreach for sex workers. This is one of the organizations that I hope to spend the most time with over the next few months. I am hoping to get a sense of how they understand gender and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, and how well their programs meet the needs of their clients. If I can become familiar enough of an entity among their constituents I will conduct life history interviews with some of the sex workers.

Monday I am going to visit a youth center out in a Dakar suburb (i.e. shantytown) that has an innovative girls empowerment program. I am planning to follow some girls through the year-long program and to interview program graduates. The program supporters seem keen to have me help them refine some of their evaluation processes so I hope I can be helpful to their project without getting too far afield of my research. It is always a tricky balance--how to offer something useful to people who are infinitely generous with their time and resources? Sharing research results isn't always enough, so it is ideal if there are parts of one's research that can actually address issues that the organizations themselves are concerned about.

Meanwhile I have another side-project going to help flesh out an advocacy strategy for sexual minorities (gay men) who have been persecuted here for doing AIDS education among their peers, and I think I will submit an abstract to an AIDS conference in South Africa in December. Now that Ramadan is over I will start pursuing a dozen or so other research leads that I had on the back burner.

Biggest quality of life decision to make this week: should we join the American Club, now renamed the Club Atlantique to be slightly less provincial? I am going to go read the section entitled "Relations with Expatriates" in my overseas research manual. Not even kidding about that: Barrett and Cason, 1997. Overseas Research: A Practical Guide. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 60-63. I will report back.