So, how was Africa?

As a follow-up to my last entry, I want to talk about being back in the States. Most of you can probably imagine the responses I get from people when they find out that I’ve spent time in Senegal. The people I surround myself with tend to be the kinds of people who love to travel and are interested in countries outside of the U.S. and Europe. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a lot of ridiculous comments. Even when people don’t come right out and ask me if I lived in a hut surrounded by naked men with grass skirts and spears, I can usually tell from their looks and comments that they are trying hard to figure out if their perceptions are correct.

I don’t blame them. I doubt I could’ve found Senegal on a map of West Africa before I decided to go there. Senegal, particularly, is not often in the news. That’s a good thing for an African nation, but it means that you may have only heard a few things associated with ‘Senegal’ or ‘Senegalese’, or none at all. There’s so much mystery about what is fact versus fiction when it comes to Africa – even if we know that the starving children we see on t.v. are not all there is to the continent, it can be hard to know what else to believe. After all, the Disney movie about Africa that we were exposed to as kids [The Lion King] didn’t even have people in it!

Whether simply responding to, ‘Did you have a good time?’ or telling my friends in-depth stories, I find myself toeing the same line as I did in Senegal. I want to shock people’s perceptions, so I tell them what they don’t expect. I tend to mention the air-conditioned nightclubs with overpriced champagne first, then the amazing music scene, and how my host family is on Facebook. Of course, those aren’t really the things I want to share. My experiences worth telling about much more often concern travel and villages and my experiences without the things I’ve grown up accustomed to. Also, I realize that if I try to portray Senegal as ‘just like the States’ to encourage people to banish their misconceptions about Africa, I’m also being misleading. Senegal is mostly rural, and very poor. I did witness the kind of poverty we can’t imagine in New Jersey.

As in Senegal, I end up hemming and hawing and jumping from story to story, extreme to extreme. Maybe my narratives about Senegal don’t make much sense to those here who are hearing them, but it can be exhausting feeling as though your anecdotes will color someone’s perception of an entire continent. (Especially when you’ve only visited the one country.) I can only try to encourage people to visit for themselves, so they don’t have to rely on my stories!