I have a dream

This week one of the sessions in the girls' empowerment program was devoted to thinking about dreams. In the session the girls reflected on different kinds of questions: What is a dream? Why are dreams important? What are my dreams?

The idea was to get the girls thinking about their hopes for the future. If one has a dream, the logic of the session goes, one can begin to envision the steps one needs to take in order to make one's dream come true. Since these are girls who have minimal schooling, many of them have been taught that their main calling in life is housework and child care. If they could dream up a future for themselves, what might it look like?

To help the girls start thinking about goals that they might pursue, the group leaders read an excerpt from the "I have a dream" speech that was translated into Wolof. (This was not an easy passage to follow, but hopefully the 13-16 year olds have a better Wolof vocabulary than I do.) After we discussed the speech, the girls were told to close their eyes and imagine themselves at age 40. What memory would make them the happiest? What would they have liked to achieved? What would they have done that they would be proud of?

Each of the sixteen girls drew a picture of her three answers, and then they shared their dreams with the rest of the group. Perhaps this shouldn't have been surprising, but I found the similarity in the girls' answers striking. Three themes emerged as the runaway winners: studying and getting a diploma (14 girls mentioned this), sending one or both parents to Mecca (10 girls), and building their parents a house (9 girls). About ten girls also mentioned having some kind of career aspiration, from just "working" (2) to being President or Mayor (5).

Without reading too much into the exercise, it is obvious that almost every girl wishes she had been able to attend school. Some of them have never attended, while others went for a few years before they were pulled out to help with housework, or because "girls don't need to go far in school since they are just going to become wives and mothers." Each girl who completes the empowerment program will be recognized at the year end ceremony next July. I've been told that every year there are proud tears as the girls receive their diplomas.

The other clear message is how much social status and recognition comes from doing right by one's parents. Sending your mother to Mecca, or building a house for your father, is a clear sign of a good son or daughter who puts the needs of others (particularly parents) first. Perhaps this is not a radical path to girls' empowerment, but these girls have definitely learned what is valued by their society and culture.

Perhaps most interesting was the brainstorming session about how to begin working to make their dreams come true. My favorite answers: be determined, respect yourself, get up early, don't sleep until the sun is high in the sky, be ready to work hard and sweat, and don't get married too young. Words to live by. You go girls!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I certainly have nothing against Christmas, but one of the nice things about being in another cultural space is that one gets to embrace a totally different events calendar. Who needs Halloween and Christmas when we've got Tabaski and Tamxarit and even Magal Touba?

We hadn't planned on doing much for Christmas, and we still don't have any definite plans for he 24th and 25th, but I was mistaken if I thought that Christmas would pass by largely unseen here. Although only 5% of the population is Christian, Senegal seems to have fully embraced Christmas (at least the version with Santa Claus, Christmas trees, tinsel, and lots of cheap plastic crap for kids).



One of the earliest signs of the season was the ambulatory artificial tree salesmen. Not only do they carry artificial trees around, but they often have long strings of tinsel wrapped around their necks. This makes for quite a festive scene.



The fancy Casino grocery stores are selling real (real!) Christmas trees at a variety of prices, from $25 to $500.There has also been a glut of inflatable Santas in a variety of sizes being sold all around Dakar. I was in an elementary school yesterday, and the classroom I was in had a tiny tree with a single bow on it. In the school's corridor an inflatable Santa was hung up by the neck, which made him look a little bit like he had been lynched. Poor Santa.




I'll need to start doing some research to find out how best to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Dakar. Stay tuned for more holiday updates.

Two dozen interviews down...dozens to go

Between the two of us my research assistant and I have conducted about two dozen interviews over the past month. (When all is said and done, we hope to have a sample of around 80 women, some of whom we will interview more than once, so a ballpark grand total of about 160 interviews).

There are of course many pros and cons to using interviews as a research strategy. On the plus side, if you have worked hard on your questions, and you continue to refine them over the course of your field work period, you are able to ask direct questions that get at exactly what you want to know. On the down side, interviews are a very artificial form of communication. No matter how much you try to put a person at ease, it is just not a normal style of conversation when one person is asking all the questions and recording everything.

Another down side, and one that we are struggling with, is that people are often unwilling or unable to give full, truthful answers to our questions. (Hence the importance of field notes in which you write down what people actually do and say in more informal interactions, instead of relying solely on their own accounts of their actions).

In this first round we are interviewing a lot of people we know, so we have a pretty good idea of what they are omitting. By far the most difficult thing is for unmarried women to admit that they have had sex. The "good girl" ideology is so powerful here (and good girls, of course, don't have sex before marriage) that even girls who we know have multiple boyfriends who they use for different things (money, going to clubs, eating in restaurants) are still unable to discuss sex directly. They will tell us that they think about 80% of young women sleep with their boyfriends, but not them of course. I haven't decided what to do about this methodological conundrum. The interviews in which women have actually recounted their sexual experiences, and there are several, are worth their weight in gold.

We are still polishing our interview guides, but we have a few gems among our questions. Among my favorites: What advice would you give to a friend who was about to get married? This question brings out all kinds of answers that touch on what kinds of behavior society expects from married women, but also the inevitable disappointments that marriage brings and how to cope with them.

Questions about polygamy and relations among co-wives also generate a lot of interesting responses. Some women are convinced that polygamy never works, while others contend that it is no big deal as long as you have confidence in yourself and your own relationship with your husband. As one woman reasoned, "no woman is the second wife in the bedroom." Words to live by, if you find yourself with a co-wife that is.

Post-Tabaski update

It was bloody. It was gory. It was Tabaski. According to some estimates around 650,000 sheep were killed in Senegal last Saturday for the "Fete d'Abraham." People ordered sheep from the rural areas to be sent to them, bought them in their own neighborhoods (expensive if you live in Dakar or environs), and sometimes even traveled with their sheep from one part of the country to another.

We made it out of town two days before the holiday, which still made for lots of chaos and jockeying trying to get out of the city. Once we hit the main roads things were fine, but we found all the pre-holiday congestion and last-minute shopping in Saint Louis that you would find in any American city the day before Christmas.

On the day of Tabaski we arrived at our friends' house just as the 9:15am prayer was getting started. Most men go to the mosque for the holiday prayer, then head home to start sharpening their knives and gearing up for the slaughter. You have to wait until you get word that your imam has killed his sheep first, and then you can proceed to kill your own.



We got the green light slightly before 10am, and our friend M was ready to go. Assisted by his 25 year old and 10 year old nephews, M expertly cut the sheep's throat, drained most of the blood, and then proceeded to skin and butcher it. Although the actual moment of death is a bit harrowing (I actually thought A might keel over, much to the amusement of all the kids watching him gape in horror at the whole thing), once the sheep is dead the butchering process quickly becomes more like a science project. You quickly forget the drama of death and become interested in sheep anatomy.




M knows his way around a sheep, so it was fascinating to watch his strategies for getting the skin off intact, removing the forelegs and hindlegs, and then proceeding to open up the insides. About two hours later the whole process was over, and M's wife N was grilling us up a lovely late-morning brunch of fresh grilled mutton.


The day after we returned to Dakar M telephoned to say he had totally forgotten to package up one of the legs so we could bring it home with us. I told him he had already gone above and beyond the call of teranga (Senegalese hospitality) and not to worry. Besides, what do people in an apartment with a tiny freezer and a small oven do with an entire sheep leg, complete with foot and hoof?