Well, here I am with only two July days and one early (too early) July morning left of my summer/ on my home continent/ before my five month sojourn in the AFRICA. Following months of dwelling in the haze of some nebulous anticipations about what my experience during this program in Senegal could possibly be like, it is finally, yet not wholly, setting that I will yet again be replanting my fragile little mind roots to germinate in completely foreign soils. Now the obvious first ground to cover are my expectations for how I imagine my time in Senegal will be and secondly how I will react to immersion in a society whose, as my MSID packet notes, "values, priorities and goals are quite different from those we have been brought up with, have believe in and have defended for many years... these goals differ from those of Western societies, the dress code, eating habits, work ethic, attitudes towards money and material possessions, ideas about equality, the structure of language, holidays, religious, education, sex roles, and the importance of time and space all reflect different priorities."
Well fuck me. I consider my evacuation to a Chicago suburb after Katrina, various stumbles through Francophile culture, or maybe starting anew in Pennsylvania all to have been sociological exercises for me in which I would pick apart and explain the elements of a heritage and identify from the air the underlying assumptions and elements that make a place, a people different from the amalgamation of my own, mostly New Orleans-constituted mind. That being said, I feel as if no amount of jet lag-recovery can reset my clocks if notions of time and space differ from those that I use, and have always used as mechanisms running my most basic thought processes and rationalizations.
