Charity

Since being in Senegal I have had to learn to rudely and unmistakably ignore everyone who comes up to me. I hate being like that, but if you pay any attention you will soon learn that your nice new friend sells overpriced statuettes or can arrange your tour of a nearby national park or can help you find a cab or good hotel. In other words, it’s never sincere. Actually, I am sure it sometimes it’s a genuine greeting but it’s so often just a sales pitch that I don’t have the chance to find out (kinda like how most women have to set-up the surface-to-air missile defenses whenever any dude approaches them, even if he just wants to know what time it is). Sometimes it gets murky though. For example, when walking around the island in St. Louis we were approached by a nice, middle-aged Senegalese man who asked us how we found St. Louis. Immediately, I doubted his intentions but he seemed nice enough. He took us around and broke down mad shit about the city and its fishing industry since he was born and raised there and works as a fisherman. After about 25 minutes, though, the truth came out. He confessed that he had come back from asking a friend to borrow money and that he had been unsuccessful and really didn’t want to go home empty-handed, could we buy him some food? Since I fear that my heart is turning to steel here in Senegal since I have to say no to begging children, handicapped people and old folks on the daily I decided to buy him some milk and coffee for his family. But that’s the problem with charity, it depends on the mood of the rich individual. Sometimes I give, sometimes I don’t, depending on how guilty I feel for being a toubab on that given day. Still, charity is not justice and is not the solution to the world’s poverty because few give people give us as much as they should and then it depends on mood, personality and chance. I have tried being consistent with to whom, when, and where I give, but it’s hard to decide who is “worthy” and who isn’t when everyone has a human right to food, housing, education and healthcare, and when really it shouldn’t be up to me or anyone person to decide whether someone gets to eat today or not. Furthermore, I have found that the richer people are the greedier and more tight-fisted they are (duh, like my dad used to always remind me, you don’t get rich by spending) making any “more philanthropy is all the world needs” solutions laughable. I have been impressed by how even the poorest people in Senegal give regularly to others poorer than them. Although that also has a lot to do with the religion with alms to the poor or Zakah being one of the five pillars of Islam (does anyone else think it’s fucked up that Islam assumes that there will always be beggars to receive alms?) it’s still admirable.
Our fisherman friend.

Dancing with White Folks

We were late to that evening’s festivities. Some of the male employees (we only saw one woman on staff) were drumming and dancing for all of the Spanish tourists staying there (and I don’t mean Spanish in the ghetto sense, they weren’t Puerto Rican, they were actually from Spain). Then of course they started pulling all of us to dance. So we danced and made fools of ourselves like all the others. It’s one of those moments when you are making fun of people for doing something that you too could easily be accused of, i.e. hypocrisy. Afterward our lovely drummers and dancers served us dinner (people in Africa are so nice!) Over dinner I met the other guide. The first guide was the one dancing super flashy. He spoke Spanish poorly but tried to make up for it with enthusiasm like when we were waiting for the bathroom and he congratulated my dancing by exclaiming that “Bailar es muy bueno!” I got the feeling he was the kind of gregarious dude that figured out that if he just danced and smiled for white folks he could get them to give him a lot of money. On the other hand, the other guide spoke great Spanish using words like “transgredido” that I don’t think I have ever spoken, and explaining concepts like a comparison between the Sereer’s more egalitarian social structure and the Wolof’s rigid caste system in Spanish, something that I could never do. I got the feeling he would rather have been studying Cervantes, but had to reconcile himself to the demeaning reality that he could make more money leading groups of middle-aged Spanish folks through his country. Dinner was good though.