Rural Visit in Linguère

Animals returning home at the end of the day

I returned to Dakar yesterday after doing my ten day rural visit in Linguère, a town in Northern Senegal. I stayed with the pastor’s family of the Lutheran Church of Senegal and got a chance to see what the non-profit I am interning with does for the community there. The first thing I noticed was the change in temperature. My host family in Dakar warned me that I was going to die because of the heat but I didn’t realize what they meant. It was at or above 100 degrees during my stay and the Senegalese were saying that this was nothing compared to the months of June, July or August. Whereas in the US people seem to wear less clothing during the winter months, people here still wore robes/dresses and covered their faces to protect themselves from the sun.

There are many differences that I noticed between the city and the town/village life. One is the mode of transportation. In Dakar, I am always getting honked by cabs and there are car rapides everywhere, but life’s much calmer in the town. The main way of getting around if you don’t have a car is taking a cart, usually pulled by a horse. There were other carts pulled by donkeys, but these seemed to be for transporting goods. To get to the villages, you had to take one of those small trucks, with everyone standing in the back. I saw this last week when people were coming and going from the weekly market.

Another difference between the city and town has been the amount of animals roaming around. They raised cows, sheep and goats. We mostly saw the goats around town but around 6 and 7 pm, you would notice the other animals heading home. Sometimes they were led by a person and other times they were on their own. I had to ask how these animals returned to the right house and I was assured that they knew how to get home.

My town was blessed to have a hospital, schools, running water and electricity. Before going on the rural visits, we had been warned that we wouldn’t possibly have the same infrastructures as we do in the city. The main road in the town was paved while all the side streets were dirt. Even though there weren’t that many cars around, I found myself in the habit of looking both ways before crossing the streets.

One thing I really enjoyed about my rural stay was being with my host family. My host dad was in another town, getting ready for a wedding so it was just me, my host mom and siblings. The two boys were ages 2 and 5 while the girl was 11. I brought my cards with me and I taught them garbage, ERS and spoons. They also taught me some games and we spent many hours passing time this way. The youngest boy didn’t speak Wolof or French so we never actually understood each other, but we got along just fine. During the day, I went to work with my host mom and got to see the work that they do to improve public health in the town and surrounding villages.

Although I rediscovered how transportation needs to be improved because a 4 hour ride shouldn’t take 10 hours and it was very hot in Linguère, I had a great experience seeing another region in Senegal and spending time with the people there.