Sama Ndiayen in 2022
This morning I left my village, Sama Ndiayen, and my life
there as a Peace Corps volunteer. I
awoke before sunrise in my empty hut, and said a tearful goodbye with my host
family. I caught a car and then a bus to
Dakar, where I now sit at a cyber cafe amid the busy streets, the ever-growing
number of tall buildings, the ubiquitous advertising and glamorous lifestyles
that mark the life of the city. It is a different world from the one in which I
woke up.
A friend who recently finished his Peace Corps service told
me that leaving was like having his Wolof alter-ego die. I think this is an apt metaphor. While I have learned much during my time here
that I will take with me, the person I was in Sama Ndiayen, Babacar Ndiaye, was
a product of the cross-cultural exchange involved in being a foreigner in a
Senegalese village, and his time has come to an end.
I spent my last couple days visiting each household in my
village and nearby Fas Toucouleur to say goodbye, and giving away many of my
possessions to family members and friends – settling the estate of Babacar
Ndiaye, if you will. I bought a few
chickens for a farewell lunch with my family; my brother Seexu acted as
official photographer with the camera I left him. It was difficult to bid farewell to my family
and friends and many other colorful characters I have had the privilege of
knowing during my time here. I wish them
all the best. Yalla naa leen maaye sutura.
I am not sure when or if I will return to Sama Ndiayen, but
over the past week I wrote up the following thoughts about what I might find if
I were to return in 10 years:
1. Things will be bigger.
I have often tried to picture the kids in my host family as
grown ups, but I can’t very well. At
times the kids annoyed the hell out of me, but more often their curiosity and
playful energy made me feel glad to be here.
I will be eager to see how they turn out.
As the kids grow, I predict that the village will also. Village elders describe the Sama of their
youth as a tiny village; indeed it was founded only about 100 years ago. Today, it has grown to over 600 people. I can only see this trend continuing. Families continue to have many kids, and
better healthcare (we have a health post 4 km away) is decreasing child mortality
and lengthening life expectancy. Older
men in Sama Ndiayen are known in the area for taking multiple wives, and most
of the younger men seem to want multiple wives, when they can afford them. Although some families may leave Sama for the
cities to work, it is more typical (and cheaper) for families to stay in the
village while sending sons and husbands to Kaolack, Dakar or abroad to work and
send money home.
If I were to return in 10 years, I would likely see a good
many new faces, and I would recognize more men than women. Women usually marry outside their home
village, whereas men usually continue to live with their parents after
marriage.
2. Some things won’t
change
Today, Sama Ndiayen is accessible by a 4km dirt road that
leads to the national highway. Most
people travel this road by foot or horse cart, although there are about five
bicycles in the village and a couple village men own scooters and two own taxis
that they drive to Kaolack every day. If
incomes rise, there will probably be more bikes, scooters and cars in the
village 10 years on. But I doubt the
road will be improved. Many of the
national highways, including the one from Dakar to the Gambian capital Banjul,
are in a very poor state, and it seems unlikely that the government will begin
building small local roads to villages like Sama anytime soon.
People in my village have been talking about getting
electricity for a long time, but this I also doubt will happen within 10
years. In the lead-up to the
presidential elections last spring there was hope that former president
Abdoulaye Wade would bring us electricity in order to help his campaign. The village sent three men, including my
friend Papa, to Dakar to make a personal appeal to Wade’s son, Karim, who was then
head of Senelec, but in the end Karim was too busy to meet with them. (Papa tells me, however, that they were fed
good food by the staff and they were impressed by Karim’s elevator.) Most of the countryside remains
unelectrified, and Senelec struggles to keep power on in the areas that
are. Although compared to much of
Senegal, Sama Ndiayen is not remote, many less-remote towns nearby on the
national highway lack electricity, and in some there are even power lines that
bypass the town. Thus, I doubt that Sama
Ndiayen can expect electricity in the next ten years.
And I’m not sure that this is a bad thing. Electricity bills can be expensive, and the
things electricity is often used for, like TV, cold drinks, and loud music, are
not productive. However, my friend Tam
who lives in Keur Socce, where there is electricity, says the town has grown a
lot and there are more jobs now compared to ten years ago, when electricity
came. The town now has a lot of
businesses and government employers that use electricity – shops, metal
workers, a health post and a new internationally-funded malaria research
center. But I think that Keur Socce’s
location on the highway has been equally important to its prosperity. If Sama were to become electrified, I doubt
it would be able to reap the same benefits.
Because of its location, it is unlikely to become a commercial center
like Keur Socce.
3. Education and
technology might improve people’s lives somewhat
Last year, the primary school in Sama Ndiayen, which opened
6 years ago, had its first graduating class, and ten students went on to the
collรจge
level. (A less momentous, though
noteworthy achievement is that a development project built the school its first
bathrooms this year. They are luxurious
and handicap-accessible; unfortunately, the classrooms remain neither.) I think that as time goes on, more students
will continue studying to higher levels.
This is good, but I’m not sure the quality of the education is anything
to get excited about. And this year the
school year was nearly anulled because so many school days were lost to student
and teacher strikes (often concerning the government’s failure to pay
teachers).
As throughout the Muslim world, alongside the secular
education system exists the Quranic schools, or daaras. Many students attend both religious and
secular schools, but many only attend the daara. In Sama Ndiayen, there is a currently one
daara, which provides a traditional religious education based on rote
memorization of the Quran. Aliou Njay, a
man from Sama Ndiayen who studied at Al-Azar University in Cairo, has proposed
a second daara, to provide vocational as well as religious education and is
awaiting a grant from the Turkish government.
I hope to see this school up and running if I return in ten years.
Finally, it is often said that technology drives
development. I think that technology can
help improve people’s lives, but I also think this argument can be
exaggerated. Cell phones have become
widespread in Senegal over the past decade.
In Sama Ndiayen, most households have at least one cell phone. But credit is so expensive that calls are
pretty infrequent. It seems likely that
smart phones and wireless internet access will become available over the next
10 years. While internet access could offer people here lots of useful
information, I don’t think it will make much difference so long as literacy
remains low.
4. Farming will be less important
Today much of Sama’s wealth comes from remittances. The families that have cement batiments are
the ones that have members working in Dakar or abroad. Farming is important for food and income, but
soils are poor and more and more fertilizer is needed each year in order to
have a profitable crop. Chemical
fertilizers hurt the soil in the long run, and soil is lost every year due to
erosion. As the population increases
there will be less land per person available for farming, and less land will go
fallow each year. As farming becomes
harder, I think families will depend more on their members who find work
outside the village.
I think the farming problem will be worse in Sama than in
other villages in the area because Sama already has relatively little land per
person. Fas Toucouleur, the village
right next door, has a smaller population and more land per person (a lot of
people from Sama rent fields in Fas Toucouleur each rainy season). Because they have more land, people from Fas
Toucouleur are able to fallow their fields more regularly than people in
Sama. I think that extra land has also
given them a more optimistic attitude toward farming as a way of life. Fewer young men from Fas leave the village to
work than in Sama, and so their village has more labor available for
agriculture. They grow a wider variety
of crops (in addition to the staples peanuts, millet, sorghum, and corn, they
grow a lot of cow peas, watermelon and cassava) and have invested a lot of time
into building wooden fences around their fields to keep out animals. They also have substantial cashew orchards,
and I worked with a number of people from Fas Toucouleur on planting live
fences around their fields. I’ve asked people in Fas Toucouleur why
people from Sama go to the cities to work instead of fencing in their fields
and diversifying their crops, and a frequent response is “Wolofs just want
money” (Sama Ndiayen is Wolof, whereas Fas Toucouleur is Toucouleur). That there is a cultural difference may be
true, but I would hazard to speculate that the cultural difference is a result
of an underlying economic difference. Our
village’s culture may emphasize money because we have less land, and people
depend more on cash income from outside.
It may be inevitable that more and more people will leave to
seek work in cities, but before they go, I hope they plant lots of trees,
especially cashews. Cashews grow well in
our area, and they provide income through their fruit and nuts, as well as
firewood. They also improve the soil. If people take the time to plant cashew
orchards before they leave to work in Dakar or abroad, they will have a
retirement fund waiting for them when they return. If I return in 10 years, I hope to see groves
of cashews surrounding the village.
