Foo nekkoon?

“Where’ve you been?” The question everyone’s been asking me for the last few days. It’s not an easy question to answer.

When people ask this, it’s a little bit of a provocation. It’s a cultural theme in this part of West Africa that you shouldn’t reveal too much about yourself in public - You never know who might be listening, and you don’t want others to be jealous. The unsaid implication is that jealous people can resort to traditional medicine (of the nasty kind) to bring you bad luck. I don’t know how many people here in Dakar still believe that is a threat, but the tendency remains. So when an acquaintance asks me where I’ve been (and acquaintances here include the guy I bought a banana from three months ago), I need to come up with a way to explain it without revealing that I have the luxury of spending a thousand dollars on a plane ticket, just to attend a conference.

My pitiful excuse usually goes: “I’ve been around.” or “There’s been a lot of work.” White lies, which people see right through: “Have you been travelling?” “Um… just a little bit.” If the person is really bold, they continue: “Where did you go?” “You know, the town.” (this implies my home town.) The next question is either “Los Angeles?” or “Paris?” or “Was your father there?” (i.e. Was he well?)

It feels strange to be back in Senegal. It felt like I was away for much longer than just two weeks. It felt strange to be back in Urbana too, but not for the reason I expected. It was strange because I could just show up and more or less go back to doing what I did before I left on the big ‘Fulbright.’ I got home, pulled my bike out of the basement, pumped up the tires, and biked off to a coffee shop to work on my computer. Two things reminded me that I’d been gone: Spring was absolutely beautiful – but I didn’t feel the desperate relief of having survived a winter. Secondly, when I saw someone I knew, she or he stared and said something like “Whoooh. Aren’t you in Senegal?” or “Aren’t you in Africa?” “Aren’t you in… aren’t you gone?” (depending on how well we know each other) Other than that conversation, everything about being home for a week was very reassuring. Contrary to what my ego tells me, everything about a place doesn’t dramatically shift course just because I leave it for a while.

Surprisingly, being in Washington, D.C. hardly felt strange at all (I spent the summer of ’09 there as well). Maybe there just wasn’t time. I spent mine staring at the map to find the right room for the next two-hour research talk session (there were hundreds of sessions going on at the same time). In between talks I was trying to jump-start conversations with other students, or with our academic idols, and buying coffee as often as possible. I also enjoyed marveling at the several thousand professors and students who were doing the same thing as me, all in one giant, luxurious hotel. I also spent a good portion of the first two days (and nights) adding paragraphs to our paper and slides to the powerpoint. I was surprised to see colleagues who I assumed managed their time much better than I do doing the same thing. Once we finished our papers, we spent the evenings at bars and restaurants.

Direct flights are a scary thing. One minute I was standing on a long escalator down into the D.C. subway. Twelve hours of magazines and movies later I was 4000 miles away haggling over an early morning taxi outside Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport. Surprised by how unused my mouth was to forming sentences in Wolof.

Now I’m faced with what to do with my remaining 6 1/2 months. Continue working on the theme of ‘institutions, adaptation, and climate change’? Work on the forest management projects I originally planned to study? Continue taking the overnight bus to Tambacounda? Work somewhere closer to Dakar? Find an organization or another student whom I can collaborate with? On the plane I sat next to a friendly Linguistics professor from Ghana who made me question why I find the researchers I know in Senegal so intimidating.

This is new from me: I learned enough from study abroad to know that the reverse culture shock of coming home is the real threat. It’s more subtle and constant than the dramatic shock of dealing with new foods, new languages, new gastro-intestinal fauna. On this trip, home felt good to me. Now I’m back in the ‘foreign’ environment and in between big deadlines. Making the most of the time remaining here is looking to be a complicated thing to figure out.