Rainy, Rainy Ramadan

Senegal at this time of year and I have a complicated relationship. School's out, so everything seems quieter, especially for us education volunteers. A lot of students have either left for even more remote villages or headed to Dakar or Thies to take in the big city lights. And most of the men and boys spend the days in the field, farming.

It's also rainy season, which means, on the one hand, occasional cloud cover and the color green in our lives, and on the other, rampant skin infections. Ramadan has arrived, so people are hungry, dehydrated, tired and growing progressively more cranky with every day. And yet, to put a completely egocentric spin on the holy month, this is the one time of year when we volunteers can find cheese in Linguere, since people like to break the fast with special foods like dates, apples, juice and cheese. Just trying to be even handed, you know.

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Ramadan last year was definitely the emotional low point in my service. I struggled to find work and to keep myself busy for the first couple of weeks, until I had to go to Dakar to treat the first in a long line of staph infections with which you are probably way too familiar at this point. I swore to myself last year during rainy season/Ramadan that I'd leave the country on vacation this time around.

And yet, here I am, back for more of the same. In a general sense, I'm once again struggling with the same nagging feelings of purposelessness, and in an uncomfortably specific sense, I'm trying to convince myself that the suspicious fever I had yesterday and the hard, painful lump I discovered in my armpit today aren't a conspicuous neon sign flashing, "Staph v2.0: back with a vengeance."

I'm watching like a helpless mother as all the new volunteers in Linguere go through that familiar hyper-speed cycle of interested observation, followed by I-can-hack-it triumph after a couple days of successful fasting, which is then quickly shattered by an oh-my-God-we've-still-got-28-more-days-of-this-and-I'm-already-considering-eating-the-pages-of-my-books reality check. Whether or not we choose to embrace it, Ramadan's here to stay for awhile.

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Sometimes I grow saddened when I ponder the huge impediments to the development of Senegal, and Linguere in particular. These are things that are far greater than any group of people's best intentions, motivation or ingenuity.

For example, it's hot, as in really, really hot, here 90% of the time, and it's hard for any of us to be fully productive when it takes all we've got just to not tip over and fry to a crisp in the sun. Another challenge? We live in a desert--a desert with a 90 meter water table--yet subsistence farming is the main economic activity in this zone. Plants don't want to grow in the desert, and there's not all that much that composting and mulching can do about it.

And so, I sometimes wonder during Ramadan--and I'm simply posing a question here, not trying to denigrate anyone's religion--if this month of fasting might be another one of those impediments to development. From a purely economic standpoint, there's got to be a great loss of productivity, right?

Yet, it's much more complicated than that. Development is so much more than a purely economic question. And unfortunately, as with everything else here, the more I ponder this question, the fewer answers I have.