My 24 days in Senegal have come to an end and I am going home. As we drive through the empty streets of Dakar (a very rare sight) at 5am on our way to the airport, I feel pangs of sadness. During the trip, I found myself homesick many times but now that I’m going home, I don’t want to leave.
The biggest cause for my homesickness was the exhaustion that came from constantly being out of my comfort zone in different cultural situations, struggling to make my way through communication barriers in a language I didn’t speak well, and always feeling like I stuck out as a foreigner. I missed the ease of being at home, both in the sense of being in the house I grew up in and in the sense of being in America as a whole. At home, I’m not constantly aware of how I’m behaving and making sure I’m being a good, polite guest as I was for my host family. In the US as a whole, I’m able to get around independently and with little thought. I don’t need help speaking, I’m able to read the subtext behind people’s speech and body language to read situations, and I can process and understand everything going on around me without needing to give it too much thought. In summary, I found the experience taxing because it was unfamiliar and I had to figure out how it worked, yet there was a never a break from processing unfamiliar things because I was either out and about in class or exploring the city, or I was at home trying to speak to my host family through broken French.
All that being said, unfamiliarity isn’t a permanent state. After a few months in such an environment with some intensive language courses, I would be able to speak better, understand social subtexts more, and move around Senegal with more of the ease and independence I was missing. And that’s why I was sad watching the dark suburbs zoom past outside the bus window on the way to the airport: 24 days was no time at all. I hadn’t even had enough time to become aware of how little I understood, let alone begin to improve it.
This reflects a lesson that I’ve had reiterated to me in all sorts of contexts, not just through international travel. In most new things that I do, I find the first interactions with it to be overwhelming, stressful, and hard to perform at the level of ease/comfort/confidence/familiarity that I want to. However after a little time working through the new situation, it becomes easier. This is the case in my coursework, labwork, and even social situations like meeting new people. Now yes, I know this is a very basic takeaway pretty much on par with the moral of a kid’s show episode, however I find it’s something I have to repeat to myself frequently. I’m prone to perfectionism but also impatience, and so when I’m not immediately good at something, I get frustrated and want to give it up. In moments like those, I have to weigh against the knee jerk reaction to quit by reminding myself of all the other hard things I’ve had to work through and eventually gotten better at.
In the future, I’d love to study abroad again for a long period of time so that I can become more familiar with the new culture and language. I’m not sure when and how I’d do that, as I’ve decided that if I went somewhere, I would want to be doing molecular biology work since that is what my university work is all about, what I enjoy most, and what I’m best at. However, I feel that most of the exposure to study abroad things I’ve had is through public health and sociology opportunities. While I like studying these things, I’m less intrinsically motivated by them than I am by biological studies, and so I wouldn’t want another study abroad to center around them. I feel like I don’t see many opportunities that are for lab work in other countries, and so I just don’t know the process for going about that.
If I had to give another student thinking about participating in the Research and Culture in Senegal program, I would tell them two things. The first is to study French before you go, even if it’s just for a few minutes each day. One of the most frustrating parts to me was wanting to be able to communicate like an adult, but having the vocabulary and pronunciation of a toddler. I found it easier to listen to the people around me than to try and communicate, and I think my experience would’ve been significantly more fun had I been able to converse with the people around me better.
My second piece of advice would be to plan your research big. I placed a lot of limits on myself because I thought my research had to be done in a particular way, or that it had to fit a gap in the knowledge, or that certain things wouldn’t be possible so I didn’t even entertain the thought of doing them. Once there, I realized that trying to be perfect with the research methodology as an undergraduate doing independent research for 24 days was an unrealistic standard I was forcing upon myself, and I should’ve just spent time researching based on what I thought was worthwhile instead of doing it “by the book”. In fact, I don’t even think there is much of a book and I have a much more formalized perception of scholarship than it really is. Additionally, the personnel of the West African Research Center really want to help you and have many connections throughout Dakar and even Senegal as a whole. If you have a plan, they can get you the contacts, interviews, site visits, etc. to see that plan to fruition within a few days. It’s much less bureaucratic than in the United States where there’s legal forms, processing times, and strict schedules you must work around.
Looking back on Senegal, I’ll miss my host family who reminded me so much of my own extended family. I’ll miss the food which was always delicious. I’ll miss learning new things about the country’s history and the specifics of the many different cultural groups, slowly building out understandings of them in my mind. I can’t wait to visit again at some point in the future.
