A fisherman in my village on the Senegal river at sunset

Adama my host father preparing a lunch of grass for the sheep and Tabara his second wife sorting rice





















My sister Penda making dinner. For the last 7 months she has been in The Gambia cooking for her brother Pape while he worked on a fishing boat there.





















My two moms in our yard a typical afternoon. That's my house in the background with the door open.
















Students in the Mouit elementary school















Ladies at the park preparing thiebujen for 50 people

Sunrise at the Biological Station in the Djoudj National Park for migratory birds















My counterparts at the Langue de Barbarie National Park during our monthly bird count















Men of my village making their way from the mosque to the cemetery for a burial




















Two talibes, boys who study at Koranic school by evening and beg for alms all day. They come to my door every morning for part of my breakfast baguette.

Sunrise at the Biological Station in the Djoudj National Park for migratory birds















My counterparts at the Langue de Barbarie National Park during our monthly bird count















Men of my village making their way from the mosque to the cemetery for a burial




















Two talibes, boys who study at Koranic school by evening and beg for alms all day. They come to my door every morning for part of my breakfast baguette.

Striking a balance between natural resource conservation in Africa and their traditional use by local populations is one of the greatest challenges in managing the continent’s national parks and other protected areas. In fact most national parks in Africa,while touted in the West for preserving scarce or endangered flora and fauna, are often regarded with resentment and uncertainty by local communities. In creating parks and reserves, many countries have forcibly removed entire villages from within their limits to new locations along their periphery. Traditional hunting, fishing, logging, and fruit gathering is often limited or even outright banned.

In Senegal, natural areas are managed by the Department of National Parks, a pseudo military organization staffed by wildlife experts and park agents who undergo military training and who are well armed not only to prevent poaching, but for national defense purposes as well. The Langue de Barbarie park along Senegal’s northern border with Mauritania, has a stock of automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades (RPG-7). With a war between Senegal and Mauritania only a decade old, this stockpile does not exist without precedent. Likewise, in the South of the country the Basse Casamance park, known for its thriving populations of monkeys and jaguar, has been closed to visitors for over a year as rebels in the region continue to wage a separatist “conflict” with the Senegalese military that has seen action in the park itself. Just this past summer, an American aid worker with the Red Cross who visited the park was killed by an antiperssonel landmine.

Rebellion and war, while serious threats in select areas, remain improbable scenarios in most of Senegal’s parks. Yet poaching and the everyday exploitation of resources for food, fuel, and medicine by local people persist as real challenges to park agents whose mandate is to protect biodiversity. At the Langue de Barbarie park, the situation is somewhat unique. Primarily a marine park created to protect populations of sea turtles and migratory birds in the Senegal River Delta, the ecosystem’s main threat is overfishing. But instead of forbidding fishing entirely, the Langue de Barbarie tolerates sustenance fishing by the local population. Unlike the commercial fishing that abounds off Senegal’s coast, sustenance fisherman bring home their take and sell their surplus to their neighbors. Everday, scenic expanses of the park are filled with dozens of fisherman along the river’s banks and in dugout canoes throwing their nets into picturesque waters.

At the park’s boundaries, small fishing camps have been set up along the beach where dozens of pirogues sit alongside one another before facing the waves and whitewater of the local sandbar to reach offshore fishing grounds. Here, catch limits do not exist and the piles of tuna, sharks, rays, eels, and other fruits de mer make obvious the distinction. The fisherman here know that within the park boudaries they cannot fill their nets as they can at the edges and their reactions to the regulations are mixed.
Some complain that the park benefits the toubabs, the white people only. They see its rules as an obstacle to an already precarious profession. Others think that the park is a good idea because it gives the fish a place to reproduce and grow. Still other fisherman within the park have adapted to the situation and now make money giving boat tours to tourists.

Surprisingly few however, mention the likely effects of the foreign commercial vessels, mostly Asian and European, that overshadow their artisanal Senegalese counterparts. The Senegalese government has sold lucrative offshore fishing rights to several countries hungry for the abundance of species on the West African coastline. Sadly, local fisherman and the population they feed may now be paying for it.

Africa’s protected areas and national parks may provide some indication of how developing countries deal with mounting pressures on natural resources. More mouths to feed and fewer fish to feed them is undoubtedly the trend places like Senegal will face in the years to come. An increase in deforestation coupled with the advance of the desert into sub-Saharan countries make the situation in Africa’s Sahel region that much more prescient. Parks and reserves may be able to stop local villagers from destroying vegetation or poaching sensitive species, but along their edges hungry people will continue to fish, hunt, and cut the wood they need to feed their families.

I wake up every morning a white man in black Africa, a Westerner in a developing country. I am a stranger in a place that while completely foreign has felt somehow familiar to me since I arrived a year ago. I am not a tourist. Tourists here are like country club members in a bowling alley. They come to have fun, but only because it’s a novelty they can enjoy and safely escape from. I am not a missionary. The missionaries are much friendlier than I am, immediately your confidant and infinitely interested in you and your story. I am not a foreign aid worker either. They have 4x4s with drivers, houses with guards, budgets to spend and romantic expatriot lifestyles. I don’t live a rich lifestyle, but I do live an exciting one. I am a Peace Corps volunteer, representing the United States and its people and culture to Senegal, West Africa and hers.

My job is different than what most people would label a job because I can show up anytime I choose, and I always wear sandals. Making people laugh at me can be viewed as a good day at work, and not only do I not have a salary, but I am sometimes forced to beg my parents for an extra fifty dollars here and there to support my drinking habit and need for a steak once in a while. I am nearly untouched by deadlines, meetings, or accountability. My phone doesn’t ring, my inbox doesn’t chime with each new message, my ears don’t hear that faint hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. I am in a completely different world, off the grid, under the radar.

I am different than the other toubabs here, the white people. I am different because I speak the same language as the Senegalese people, and I don’t mean French, though I do speak French. I speak Wolof, the most prominent language among the more than 40 ethnicities that make up the country’s diverse population. Imagine 40 languages actually spoken in the US, where Italians would understand German, Mexicans would speak French, and Romanians would speak Mandarin. It’s like that here. You have your own language, be it Mandinka or Pulaar, but you understand many, Wolof being the most likely. Wolof sounds a lot like Clingon from Star Trek, glutteral and gruff, with lots of sounds like you’re hacking a loogey or suddenly getting choked halfway through a sentence.

Like in any other language, I learned the importance of being able to gesture and intone Wolof. The words say a lot, but the way you say them is crucial-- the trailing off of certain phrases, where to put the emphasis in “Thanks Be to God,” how to shake your finger at someone like you are angry at them. The effect is powerful. When you see a foreign traveller in the US, you expect they will speak English. You are not surprised much less impressed.

In Senegal however, a Toubab that speaks Wolof is an african dictator that imposes term limits. Disbelief is followed by laughter, humor is followed by admiration, appreciation is followed by offers of sisters or daughters for prospective wives (I can have up to four), even babies to take back to the US to raise as my own. Perhaps because of the adoption offers, I sometimes think about a chance meeting I might have with a celebrity one day back home, let’s say Brad Pitt. I tell Brad, “man I really know what’s it like for you, being stared at, wanted, offered babies, yet sort of lonely in your immense popularity.” He thinks I am crazy as any star would hearing this, but I really do know what it’s like to be a celebrity.

People here know my name and I have no idea who they are, and not just someone here or there. It happens all the time. “Mansour!” “Diop! Mansour Diop!” They greet me and know that I am the toubab that speaks Wolof. They know that I am different than the other toubabs. My name of course is not Mansour Diop, but in Senegal it is. It is tradition for a family to give you their last name, and as an adopted son in the home of my village host father Adama Diop, he named me after his brother Mansour.

Nobody knows Nat Parker, hell I’m not sure I know him so well anymore myself. But Mansour is prolific. He can dance like the Senegalese, he understands money problems in a way that the Senegalese recognize, he eats the same rice and fish they do every single day. Mansour has parasites just like the Senegalese, he takes bucket baths, and hold your breath for this one: he wipes his ass using water and his left hand, just like the Senegalese, just like the rest of the developing world. Nat Parker is not a bare-handed ass wiper. He never really liked fish either. He enjoyed fine bourbans and scotchs back home, iced and abundant. Here, Mansour reaches for a $3 bottle of Club 7 Whiskey and drinks it straight when he can afford it. Mmm mmm good.

I came to Africa to discover a new place and people, to adventure before a mortgage or marriage could hold me down. I chose to join the Peace Corps because I thought that I could do a better job of representing the United States to the world than the Bush Administration. The problem is that I work for Mr. Bush, and he decided that I would best represent the US to an unelectrified village of mostly illiterate and highly religious Senegalese farmers and fisherman. Not to be unhinged by such a post, I am over halfway through, and just ask anyone in Mouit, my little village on the Senegal River, what they think of the United States and they will say “I love America. Will you help me get to America? Can you get me a visa?” Of course I can’t take all the credit. Ironically, and the Bush Administration will be loathe to admit it, the Black rap community in the US may be one of our most effective diplomats in Senegal.

Just the other day my boss at the national park where I work called me into his office for what I had thought would be an assignment, maybe a translation request. Instead, he wanted me to watch “Clips,” a CD filled with video clips from American rappers. Each clip got progressively more American; the number of hot women dancing half naked multiplied, Beamers became Bentleys, and diamond encrusted necklaces were lost in crisp wads of hundred dollar bills. My boss, Sidibe, sat transfixed with a smile on his face. “I have to go to the US Mansour. If there is one thing I do in this life, it’s to go to the US.”

My approach for spreading democracy and American culture by contrast, is a little short on bling. I talk about America all the time, but my goal has been to demonstrate that Americans are just as interested in Senegal as Senegalese are taken with America. So I do my best at integrating into the Senegalese culture by attending baptisms, funerals, and all night Koranic chanting sessions with as much enthusiasm as my boss watching clips. I haven’t converted to Islam or married four wives (my host father Adama has three), but I live at least five days a week in my little village doing as they do, drinking tea, praising God, and training my counterparts in the national park in basic business skills. I knew I was doing something right when my village family stopped referring to me as a toubab and began calling me a white Wolof.

The other two days of the week, Friday and Saturday, I go to the city and drink cold beer, Club 7, and load up on protein. The four dollar steak and fries at one of my favorite restaurants speaks to me in a way that rice and fish never will. I am still Mansour when I go to town, but I am the city version of my village persona, rolling out phrases like “What up dog?” or “How’s your sex life?” to my city buddies just as easily as “The Lord be praised” or “God willing” in the village.

What I really like about this experience is that it allows me to play all kinds of different roles depending on my mood. I can talk about the onion harvest or daily catch with the people of my village in Wolof and the next day speak to French hotel owners about excessive taxes on tourism and government graft. I like debating development with NGO workers, what works better grassroots organizing or addressing systemic change? I enjoy arguing American politics with my Mauritanian jeweler friend who is a faithful follower of the BBC in Arabic. “It was your CIA that trained Osama Bin Laden Mansour, why do you think you can’t catch him?”

I keep up with my friends back home who are becoming rich, buying their first house, wondering where to spend their two week vacation this year. They seem envious of my unique lifestyle while I worry that I am falling behind the curve in advancing my career and saving for the future. I am all too certain that the American routine will catch up with me, but will it ever let them go?

My family worries about me unnecessarily, partly because that’s what families do, but also because they are just as ignorant to the realities of Africa as most Americans. They are intelligent people but will ask things like “What do people wear over there? Animal skins?” “You’re not near any cannibals are you?” or “Do you want me to send you peanut butter?” The last question may not be so dumb come to think of it.

My experience has been that Americans are only slightly more ignorant to the colonial history of French West Africa than we are to our own colonial history of western expansion and imperialism. People recognize with Sally Struthers like sympathy the rampant poverty of this place, the incessant violence and corruption that do exist. That we care about these issues greatly there is no question.

What we don’t realize I think, is how our own lifestyles and ignorance are in many ways responsible for the situation. How many Americans know what the World Trade Organization or International Monetary Fund really do? Most of us don’t realize that these American led groups maintain and perpetuate insurmountable debt in developing nations, debt that forms one of the primary obstacles to their very advancement out of poverty. The WTO and IMF give countries giant payday loans in the name of bolstering their economies and we wonder why the situation doesn’t get better. How does that happen?

But I don’t blame Americans for not fully understanding the situation over here. We are too busy trying to pay our own bills and take care of our own troubles to get personally involved in problems a continent away. Iraq has been a testament to that. I just want America to realize how much the Senegalese respect us and look up to us. We should guard that respect and try to earn more of it around the world. Maybe we could send more Peace Corps volunteers armed with “Clips” to other developing nations.

After over a year in this country battling the heat, the flies, and the runs, I realize that Senegal can teach America incredible lessons about what it means to be human. These people are poor, undereducated, and without real opportunities to better their lives. They carve out a living from the land, they sell cheap wares between row after row of cars stuck in traffic in Dakar, they work hard knowing it won’t be enough. Thousands of hopeful Senegalese are risking their lives every year by crowding into small fishing boats to brave the Atlantic and sneak into Spain to find work-- in the fields, cleaning office buildings, selling African masks and necklaces in weekend markets; basically anything. Senegal has become Spain’s Mexico, though so far there is no 700 mile wall planned for the border.

But amidst these struggles and in spite of them, the Senegalese are some of the happiest and friendliest people I have ever encountered. They have a great sense of dignity and take care of one another without question or condition. You always have a place to stay in Senegal, you are never without a bowl of rice at lunchtime. Strangers are always invited. The most important Senegalese value, teranga, translated roughly (remember Clingon) means hospitality. Clearly this is more than an ethos, it is a survival mechanism.

Before I left the US I had the distinct impression that there was a silent suffering among so many people I saw commuting to work, buying groceries, or watching their kids. They have homes, cars, education, healthcare, and most importantly opportunity, but something seems to be missing. I love the US, which is after all why I am in the Peace Corps, but is it possible that the American dream has gotten away from us? Could it be that as we acquire more and more we are growing somehow emptier? Maybe it’s possible that Senegalese teranga could be the answer to a disaffected America. Perhaps the wealth in community and kindness so abundant in this country could truly make our own that much richer.

Banana Lady’s Baby

Hello Banana Lady’s Baby. I am not sure if you are a boy or girl, what your name is, or what your future holds but I saw you from a car as I passed on the street in Dakar. You sit snuggly against your mother’s back and bottom, wrapped in an old towel as she sells bananas from the platter on her head along the side of the main road through the city. You didn’t seem to notice, but there was an almost constant cloud of blue smoke from the beat up buses, cars, and motos that pass by you all day long. Your mom was working hard when I saw her, balancing you and her bananas, smiling and selling her produce to hungry passerbys as best she could. There were many other banana ladies at the same intersection, some with their own babies.

When I was a baby like you, I think I had a mobil and a quiet crib full of toys to keep me occupied. You have the horns, whistles, and shouts of a busy road and the motion of your mother’s back to take care of you. I don’t know what will happen to you, but I would guess that in just a few years you will still be with your mom, but her back will hold your little brother or sister then, and you will be selling bananas next to them. Will you go to school or will you work all day instead? I’m not sure, but I know that you will know what hard work is at a very young age. In fact, somehow you already do.

Being a ten year old boy in Senegal does not involve daily games on an X-Box or Playstation. It resembles something more like a cross between Huckleberry Finn and The Jungle. Boys in particular, roam free in packs without supervision or rules. Armed with makeshift fishing poles village boys spend countless hours on the river or along one of the lagoons catching small carp or crabs. They swim, run, scream and fight with a Lord of Flies hierarchy, the older boys bossing and often beating the younger boys. They address each other as “Boy,” one of the distinct English additions to the Wolof vocabulary throughout Senegal. Coming home at sunset they are covered in sand and dried salt, grass stains in this case replaced by cuts from fishing hooks and shells.

When not in school or memorizing the Koran with the local marabout, the boys are sent by their fathers out to the fields to cut a rice sack full of grass each to feed the family sheep. Seeing them armed with machetes and sithes can make the hair on the back of your neck stick up for a moment when you witness their raw form of discipline among each other. During the growing season they spend at least an hour or two a day in the field pulling water from the wells to water the onion plots.

City boys, while usually governed by the same freedom, play different games and have it a bit tougher. They jump from the back of one bus to another, catching free rides for one block at a time, roaming boutique front foozeball tables with a gang like mentality. The pressure to do something to make some money for the family here is greater though. Ten year old boys in the city are just as likely to be working as going to school. They drive horse carts, transporting passengers, building materials, produce, and other boys. They sell peanuts and watermelons in the market from a stall, though more often and perhaps by nature, they roam the streets and market with some product to sell. Underwear, phone cards, bottles of water, and radios are common.

At the local Samsung store in Saint Louis, you can always count on seeing a crowd of boys pressed against the glass to watch the big color televisions inside the air-conditioned store. Soccer of course is their favorite thing to watch and certainly their game of choice. Cars fight for right of way among hoards of dusty boys playing soccer with rocks to mark off the sidelines and goal posts.

Young girls meanwhile, are more like indentured servants than their vagabond male counterparts. From morning until night, they are busy cooking, cleaning, and washing. The girls are often more physically built than the boys just because of the daily water pulling, lifting, and activity they grow up with. Village girls usually have a trace of wood smoke smell because of the time spent in the family cook sheds where they cook the rice and fish over wood that they have gathered from the bush themselves. They can clean a fish in record time and clean clothes so well that a washing machine seems a lazy excuse for the old fashioned fist after fist scrub in soapy water.

While the boys play soccer and go fishing, the girls spend hours playing with each other’s hair, braiding one piece of mesh after another to create quite exquisite dos. They play a game like parchisi and sit in the shade, lying on one another on plastic mats. All of them look after babies, often a five year old with an infant wrapped to her back, mothering it with great care.

Seeing all of this with my American eyes I can’t help but think that we are crazy and obsessed with our kids to the opposite extreme, looking out for every step, every breath they take. We are so involved I wonder if we stifle them somehow. The Senegalese model is no better though—I feel terrible seeing the distinct look of an adult in the eyes of so many children I see here. They know what it is to be in dire straights, to work hard, to have no choice. They grow up quickly in spite of their freedom to roam and play.