2010-12-08
While I tell these stories in English, I live my life now in Wolof. My struggle to translate life to language seems impossible; I feel like a typist who holds her hands over the keys slightly off, the words coming out garbled. I am lost in translation. Like an infant, I am in a new...
Read More2010-12-08
You did not think I would be doing this during my “freshman year” of university: Tey ci ngoon man dox naa fii ba Keur Massar maa fexe fekk “L’Hopital Traditionnel.” This afternoon I walked to Keur Massar so that I could try to find the “Hospital of Traditional Medicine.” Sori na de! Danga dof? It’s...
Read More2010-12-07
Living in the city of Salvador has presented the greatest challenge for me thus far. As an enthusiastic hiker and camper, I’ve been having nature withdrawals in this crowded, polluted, and relentlessly noisy city of three million people. I have yet to spend a night in Brazil in which I do not fall asleep to...
Read More2010-12-06
I don’t have a word for what my body and mind were doing the night before I started my apprenticeship. I suppose you could call it a healthy tremor. A couple days previous two other Fellows, Meg Healy, Laura Rohrer and I were told we would have the task of starting an English Language Program...
Read More2010-12-06
I recently started working at a day care for underprivileged children in Cayambe, Ecuador. Just the other day I tucked in a six month old to bed with a blanket reading “Beautiful Baby” (in English), accompanied by a picture of a smiling blond, blue-eyed baby. This was most certainly not an accurate representation of the...
Read More2010-12-06
Even in the U.S. I was aware of how many aid organizations had irrelevant missions, or did more harm than good, so I went into this wanting to observe only and come back with enough research to make an actual difference in the way people see things back at home, you know, real things. Therefore,...
Read More2010-12-06
I am freshly showered—out of a bucket—and my Senegalese mother is waiting for me: we are going to the fields. Sun streaks through mosquito net, making lace on the mosaic tile floor. “Fatima Jow!” My host mom’s voice booms my newly-acquired Senegalese name. I shout Yaay! the Wolof word for mother, poking my head around...
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