The final countdown

Well, it's finally here, the last week of my program in Senegal. I have very mixed feelings. It's certain that I'm going to miss Alex immensely as well as the culture and life of this country. Yet, there are tons of people and places I've been missing during my time here and I'm anxious to return to all of that for a while. I don't know where my life will be going in a few months after the big graduation day. AKA scariest day EVER! I like the unknown actually. It keeps things adventurous.

I've been thinking for the past few days that despite my minor complaints about how the MSID program handled some student issues I would still recommend it to anyone. I can't think of any other three month period in my life that has changed me so much. Parts of that are nothing to do with MSID at all but it's sure that some credit is due to them. The classes weren't exactly what I was hoping for but I did, in the long run, learn an awful lot. Even though in the end things did not go flawlessly with my family I am still incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to be welcomed into the home of actual Senegalese people to see how that functions. It's unfortunate that the differences between us could not be bridged because of the fact that it became so incredibly personal with me dating their son but regardless, it's impossible that the family and my time spent there could ever leave my memory. My internship was an irreplacable experience that I feel the program is completely responsible for finding. All in all I don't believe that most other people who are lucky enough to come discover this country have also the good fortune to find themselves being almost fully integrated as we as MSID students have been. There will always be glitches even in things that appear at first glance to be perfectly structured. The fact is that anything run by human beings- especially a program that works to mix individuals from very different worlds- is going to have some setbacks. Such is life.

I feel I've learned so much about development and poverty although I know that there is even more left to learn. The issue is very daunting but after being here I feel certain absolutely that I've found exactly the field I was meant to enter. What would've been really impossible to realize about development without having lived here is how cultural certain aspects of it can be. Or how some aspects of it are so intertwined that it becomes difficult to see any possible solution.

I've done a lot of traveling during the past four years and I thought of myself as very multi-cultural and very open-minded. If anyone described me as ethnocentric I would've been tremendously insulted. Now I almost feel ready to insult myself in that way. I can't help but compare the functions of my own country with that of things here. I hate that I can't change my own thoughts enough to see things in a different way. It proves only that I still have much to learn which is why even after I graduate I'll still be a student of the world.

Death by hangnail

No really. I might die from this hangnail. This is sort of funny, but also not really. I always imagined my death being a result of something way less painful than an infected hangnail, or at least way cooler. So, here's the scoop. The other day I get this hangnail on my thumb. Okay, I get hangnails all the time, no biggie. Except this little bugger hurts a lot and Alex is really concerned about it. A couple days later he tells me that I really need to take care of it because his friend had one once and hid it from his family and died five days later. I laughed at him. Then I waited two more days putting Polysporin and Band-aids on it the way I always do at home. I figured a couple nights of this would clear it up very quickly. However, instead it became more inflamed and more painful. Basically my entire thumb hurts now in a throbbing sort of way and if anyone touches it I have to cry out a little. Alex kept saying I had to apply alcohol to it and I kept saying NO! because that's going to burn like hell. Last night, though, I finally gave in and we went to the pharmacy to buy some. The pharmacist there looked at my thumb and said it's the beginning of what's called a panaris. I have no idea what that is in English or if it even exists in English. I've never heard of it before. Apparently though, Alex was right and if I hadn't let them care for it last night it would just keep getting worse and worse and I guess if the infection gets bad enough without being treated you could die from it. So, I let Bo, my new "brother" treat it with alcohol which hurt so much I could barely keep from screaming and then later that night my other "brother" Francois did it again with alcohol and I think mercury. This was not fun and I am not looking forward to them doing it again tonight. It's a good thing I have my boyfriend to inform what's normal and what isn't or else I probably would've ignored it and then maybe died. The inflammation is caused by the water. This has really made me think differently. People can die from something so little as a hangnail. It's unbelievable.

I only have two days left at the hospital. Those 6 weeks went as quickly as I'd anticipated. Yet it felt like a year because I cannot even gauge how much the experience has changed me. Yesterday morning I saw two deliveries. These weren't the first deliveries I've ever seen in my life. I saw the birth of my niece Macie and the birth of Lauren's baby Collin. But in neither of those instances did I see anything resembling this experience.

To give you an idea. When I first got to the hospital I tried describing an epidural to a maternity nurse of 14 years. She had never heard of it. Women here get no form of pain medication. The only thing that enters their bodies is a glucose drip. I haven't even figured out why. The first woman to deliver yesterday I was fairly certain might die. I thought to myself, the first delivery I see in Senegal and the woman is going to die. This is not good. Luckily she didn't. At least not before I left the hospital but she maybe would've preferred to. I think if I were in her place I would've chosen death over delivery. She came in fully dilated and looked about to pass out. The women guided her directly to a delivery table. They inserted something which I think was to break her water although I cannot be certain because I was always under the impression that labor takes hours after the water has been broken. Most of the work of the delivery was done by interns in their 2nd or 3rd of three years of schooling. There was no compassion in their directing her to push. No one coached her breathing or talked to her encouragingly. After pushing and pushing without repose they had to cut the woman to allow enough room for the head to exit. This is with no anaesthesia. There was kicking and screaming involved. After the baby was born it was a process to birth the placenta that didn't seem to want to come out. Interns were reaching into her and pressing on her stomach with enormous force. The woman was squealing in pain. This is poverty. This is suffering because of being poor. I have the luxury of never having to have a baby in that manner. A luxury that maybe I had never even known to appreciate before.

I have a week and a half left here. I hope it's not my last time ever in this country. I have found two English teaching jobs that would allow me to come back next September. I want to come back. I want to live with Alex. I know it will be a struggle and my grandma is sick and I can't imagine spending so much time away from home again but when I think about being with Alex none of that matters. I don't want to leave this life. I see more here before lunch than in two years at home. Yesterday there was a fight on my Ndiagne Ndiaye. A very large woman was very upset about something, I think maybe the fact that no one wanted to let her take up an entire bench herself, and took a teen aged boy by the ear. After that I saw two babies enter the world. The other day there was a cow walking down the sidewalk in front of me. No one uses fences here but he wasn't with anyone either. Everyone was trying to shoe him away from them. These things are so Senegal. It's going to be so boring to be home. If it weren't for college and my family and friends I wouldn't even bother leaving.

An ad for abstinence

So, it's really unbelievable that I can see myself on an airplane in the very near future and in my parents' living room. I have no doubt that everyone at home who's thinking that same thing is THRILLED about it. Mom even bought the Christmas tree earlier than I think ever before in the 21 years I've been alive and I'm certain it was solely to convince herself that her kids were going to be home very soon. No doubt, I'm excited to go home. I even changed my cell phone ring to We Wish You a Merry Christmas yesterday because the only evidence of December here is the fact that the Tubaab gas station went all out with their Christmas decorations. I asked Alex why there's no Christmas music and he said it doesn't start until about December 20th. This is probably one good reason why you will never find Senegalese people in a market wrestling over a toy for their kid; they aren't yet totally fed up with the holiday. Yet, actually, that's really sad as well because there are so many other reasons that would never happen here. There such a lack of materialism here. People don't have much and don't complain much about anything. I have no doubt they would find the idea of adult people waiting six hours in line the day after Thanksgiving in the freezing cold and then trampling people to get through the doors of a department store and running as hard as they can to the toy department before proceeding to tear each other's hair out until every last piece of merchandise is off the shelves as completely ludicrous. Sure, I'm American and I also find this behavior completely absurd but at the same time the very idea of consumerism that unleashes that sort of behavior is definitely way more alive in the minds of the American people than anyone here. Sooo, I'm having a little trouble adjusting to the idea of leaving the mentalities I've adjusted to. If I sat for a whole day thinking I don't think I could come up with anything I want for Christmas or could ever justify feeling material needs when I'm already so wealthy in a million other ways, including materially.
I love my new family so much and I'm so happy that I have been liberated from MSID housing and that I fought for my right to make my own decisions. The program was definitely not very happy with my neglect to inform them that I decided to leave my house practically in the middle of the night to move in to a room with three guys that are my age but I'm incredibly happy that they came to see my point of view. So many other people in the group are not having good experiences in their houses and internships and I feel very lucky in my own (even with my first family because aside from the mother I loved almost everyone in the house).

I changed my sector of the hospital for the last time this week. I am now in maternity. I can't do as much there which is unfortunate because I was really getting into the idea of all the hands-on stuff but the things I'm observing are amazing. Monday through Wednesday was a strike so when I went Monday it was pretty uneventful. There are also about 8 other interns there everyday who are actually going to be mid-wives at the end of their time there which leaves a much smaller need for me. During the strike people come only for emergencies. One of the interns gave an exam to a pregnant woman and then asked me if I wanted to "toucher" as well. I said, "Umm... well, I dont really know what I'm looking for". I suppose I'm grateful that I am allowed to stick my hands in just anybody's vagina without any knowledge whatsoever of what to do beyond that but I figured it wouldn't do any good having my hand up in some lady's ovaries and probably knocking her baby in the head while I'm saying, "yup- I feel something".

Later that day some of the interns bought makeup from one of the nurses who always sells things there. One of the girls thought it would be fun to give me a makeover. I couldn't decide if this was a great bonding experience or a great big joke for all the other interns to laugh at the ugly tubaab. I'm still not really sure. I know for certain that after she drew black eyebrows on me and then traced my pink lips in the same black pencil and colored it in with pink lipstick I looked like a real fool but everyone seemed sincere when they said I looked pretty and I couldn't take it off so I didn't quite know what to do. I waited until they left and then rubbed the shit out of my face with tissues.

Tuesday I woke up high on Benadryl because since it got down into the mid-70s here at night I now have a cold. I was so groggy and in such a deep sleep that I took another one and passed back out until 11. This is the latest I've slept since being here. Wednesday I had a meeting with my director involving my flight from my house. Alex goes to work everyday at 7 am but Wednesday his boss said he was going to Thies (the town we spent the day in last Saturday) to do a job. So, he ended up leaving Dakar at 3:30 pm from his non-paying internship and not getting back to Dakar until 6:30 am Thursday. He spent the entire night installing an internet cafe there. When I asked him if he was getting paid for that he said he doesn't know. Can you imagine working almost 24 hours straight in the US without being paid? Can you imagine going to work and being told that you aren't going home at the normal time and you have to go to another town? Anyway, this makes me very angry! But, as soon as he got back Thursday morning he came over and crawled in bed with me and I couldn't bring myself to get out of the bed for most of the day. We cooked eggs (which he did way better than me on a kerosene flame that's not a stove), and wrestled (which was totally hot because he's a brown belt and can throw me around a lot), and just spent the whole day together and I was totally happy.

Finally on Friday I went back to my internship, though. This was a normal day in the maternity and man was it .... interesting. Here having a baby is a wildly different experience than in the US. Sometimes I can almost manage to forget that I'm in Africa until I get to the hospital and see how incredibly different the health care is. So, in Senegal there's really just no such thing as privacy. It's just not... I don't know, important to people? The salle d'achoucement or room where women give birth is just one big room with about six beds. Actually, let me correct that- there are three "beds" which I would describe more like 30 year old pieces of foam covered in a plastic type material with no sheets or coverings whatsoever. These beds are for during the labor and after the birth. The other 3 "beds" are where the women actually give birth. They're basically just tables, not long enough for the woman's whole body with no where for her head. If you entered the place without any nurses there you might have the impression that it's some horrible room for torture. When I arrived there was a woman squealing in quite a bit of obvious agony. There was another women on a delivery table hooked up to an IV, and another in a bed with her baby next to her. There was a baby in a baby cart on one side of the room. The squealing woman was vomiting and contorting her body and moaning a whole lot. A few minutes later they took her to the table area. I saw these unusual metal pans under the table and wondered what they were for until they pulled one out and shoved it under the women's butt to catch her afterbirth. The only IV the women were hooked to was a glucose drip. Yup- all natural... mmm... I don't know what it was but I started feeling nauseous and decided to go look for my bottle of water. I figured I had plenty of time to see the birth since that takes a long time. Nope. I was wrong. I came back to a newborn on the scale and the woman no longer squealing. The afterbirth was mysteriously dumped into a plastic bag and weighed. Maybe the next week I will ask about this tradition. No family or friends are in the room with the woman while she's delivering. There's really not much talking at all between her and the mid-wives and interns. The baby comes and no one really pays that much attention to it. Or to the mother really for that matter. This is not because people don't love their children in Africa or something like that. I'm not really sure the reason, actually. I was really sort of stunned at everything I saw there. Even more so I think I was horrified by the very thought of ever having children myself. Anyway, the next and last week of my internship is sure to be exciting.

My new living arrangement has its ups and downs. I now sleep in a big double bed with a rotating fan. The fan would've been realllllllly nice back in September and October when I was sleeping in a major puddle of sweat every night. I can go out when I want and I don't have to disturb anyone to get back in the house (at my old house I had to tap on the window of my parents' room if I came in later than 11 pm and then they had to open two bolted doors for me downstairs before I had to proceed to pounding on the door to my floor succeeding in waking up most or all of the 10 or 12 people in my house). The boys are super nice to me and we have political and religious debates and conversations. They are friends with Alex so he's there with me all the time and we don't have to hide. They help to keep me as comfortable as possible as often as possible and I'm so grateful for it. The only downsides are that I now have to leave my house to use the restroom and the restroom is more like a dormitory/outhouse sort of setting. There are 9 stalls which 5 families have keys to (and families here can be like 20 people). The boys at my house lost their key so they always have to walk with me to the shower to ask another familiy to use their key and I think also because they think I am too weak to carry my own water bucket. Sometimes the stalls are pretty nast and I now take bucket showers. There are still the 2 inch long, 1 inch wide cockroaches and if I take a shower past 6:30 pm I have to use a candle but none of these things really bother me too much anymore. Since I live with boys there is occasionally a bad meal but that's to be expected. I feel so strong now that I'm almost pretty certain that I can do anything I ever imagined and I feel that eating hard rice every once in a while (or one time some cow intestines) or taking a bucket shower for three weeks are definitely things I can deal with. I'm so grateful for having a place I can feel comfortable and where I'm pretty sure people actually like me that I can sacrifice all the other creature comforts that were basically dead in me anyway. Plus, I feel that I am now living in a manner that is way more similar to the average Senegalese and I think that's really important. However, I have to admit, a warm jacuzzi bath in a clean tub with a light and no insects is going to be pretty heavenly, and that's why I'm so grateful for this experience.