The amazing thing about the traveling is that it went off without a hitch. The sept-places didn’t break down. The bus didn’t happen to be carrying Tambacounda’s weekly supply of fish. I never even waited more than thirty minutes for my next ride. But I was reminded that traveling is uncomfortable in the best of circumstances – thin cushions produce to aching sit bones, packed legroom lead to bruised knees. There is always at least one baby in a nearby seat. Fortunately there are also three experienced mothers, each with her trick for getting a hysterical baby to slip back into slip. Fortunately the discomforts of travel are quickly forgotten, at least while you’re young.
To get to Medina, I passed from tour bus to village-hopping minibus, then jumped on the back of an all-terrain Guinean motorbike driven by my friend Bara Sané. And all of a sudden I was standing in the dusty courtyard of the same compound I’d lived in for six weeks, almost five years ago. And towards me came a second Bara (Bara Touré) grinning and shouting my Muslim name: “Assane has come! Assane has come!”
I was shocked by how little had changed. In my first stay, I saw how much labor went into literally keeping a rural household together. The biggest difference between modern materials (concrete and tin sheeting) and traditional ones (hard banco clay, thick branches, and thatch) is durability. But I found the same five red huts I’d last seen (although a sliver of wall and caved in inside my former hut, so it was left for the chickens). There was the same roofed shelter covering the raised bench/bed built of twisted poles.
I want to say the reunion with old friends was dramatic, that the odors and sounds renewed an old connection, that I suddenly grasped the significance of having stayed, left, and come back to this small, remote place. But honestly, after about half an hour, it felt mostly normal. Sort of like continuing where I had left off. In part that’s how people treat one another in Senegal (or at least how they treat me). Guests are incredibly important, and welcomed back with long greetings, asking after every family member back at home. You are fed incredibly well. But once you get past that, people seem to treat you in the same low key way as those they see everyday. They don’t expect much. And that’s comforting.
(Although it is important for a guest to bring gifts, this process is also laid back. It literally does not matter whatsoever what types of gift you give, so long as they are of some monetary value. You don’t have to careful calibrate your offering to the recipient’s personality and your interpersonal history like you might when birthday shopping in the West.)
So over six days in Medina, I conducted ten interviews, recorded fourteen-some hours of talk, and wrote eighty-some pages of notes. I tried to be a lot more detailed and inclusive than before, and write in full sentences. (My first visit resulted in 49 pages of notes over seven weeks) I tried to have more of a sense of what I wanted to learn, and just where the actual collection of data fit into the bigger picture of the research I want to construct, and the education I’m trying to get. And though my mood swung high and low each day – that part was very consistent with my first visit too – overall I started to think that I am extremely lucky. Lucky to have found such a place as Medina to work, and lucky to know the incredibly generous people I do.
I listed the ways I am lucky: I have one of the finest huts in the village: a concrete floor, sturdy bed and table, wooden doors (with keyed locks!), and a well-drained, private bathroom. The women in the village chief’s household cook and delivery to me three heaping meals a day. There may be a heavy presence of rice and thin peanut sauce, but there are also beans or spinach stew some nights, and there’s no way I could cook for myself on an open, wood-fire hearth. As soon as I showed up, I had willing understanding research partners, who know exactly what researchers want and were happy to help me. I realized the first day that I could ask Bara Touré, the main resident of the compound where I stay, to be a research assistant. He was born blind and, perhaps because he is the son of the village chief, spent several years studying and job training in Dakar.
Bara T. is exceptional. Fluent in Wolof, and damn good at French, he has an urban familiarity that allows me to communicate and relate with him closely. And, because he’s blind, he doesn’t undertake dry-season work that takes up most men’s days – watering fields in the banana plantation, gathering timber, traveling to meetings and weddings and funerals. He runs a business based on a solar panel acquired from an old German development project. Together with a used car battery, a series of voltage converters, and power strips, he recharges the village cell phones for about 20 cents a pop. But most of the time, he was happy to help me plan and carry out interviews, translating my clumsy Wolof to one of three languages – even creating a daily schedule of whom to visit at what times!
So although my feelings about returning to Medina (and about my research in general) still swing from morning to evening, when I’m able to step back I feel lucky I can come and go to such a place. Now I’m trying to figure out how best to sort through the details and decide what I need to do next. I’m going to a conference in April, and I want to get the most from the next month in Senegal. When I left Medina, people joked that I was in a hurry to get back to ‘my wife’ in Dakar (mostly true). I told everyone “I’ll go and come back soon.”
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