Newsletter

by Larisa Garski

Kali walked into the athletic center office, took off her pink and orange jacket, and said to me in a voice that was an unmistakable mixture of love and irritation, "I am still mad at you for leaving." Anil was older and took a more diplomatic view of the situation. He said to me when I left, "Good luck in Africa!" It was dark, and the two yellow car lamps were glowing, casting the winter air in smoke. He meant the goodness behind what he said to me, but I could tell by the brittle edge in his voice--both of cold and of sorrow--that his feelings matched his sister's. We knew this would be the end of us.

I went to Sénégal, a country in West Africa, for spring semester 2008 of my junior year [Garski is second to right in photo with program classmates]. As a French major where an extended study abroad stay is "strongly encouraged," I knew early on that it was either MSID Sénégal or the Montpellier, France, program. (My mother, who studied abroad in Japan for three months in 1969 when she was barely 16, told me once that she never regretted choosing not to study abroad in Europe. "I wanted to see another part of the world as it was, not as others said it would be.") I was still undecided about where to study when I took Engl 3741 Literacy and American Cultural Diversity with Eric Daigre as a sophomore. It was a service learning course, and it opened a new door in my academic career. I had been raised on the philosophy that giving begins at home. At the athletic center where I worked, I helped children like Kali and Anil with their homework and designed games to keep them happy and occupied while their parents played badminton, the popular sport. This was not part of my job description. I worked with the children because they needed me, and I needed them to keep me from studying to the point of academic burn out: Colonel Chabert or a rousing game of freeze tag, during which I was perpetually "it"? Not a difficult choice.

When I took Eric's class, I experienced an echo of this sort of philosophy in the idea that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. No one is inherently at a more privileged intellectual plane than another. It was through this course that I began to volunteer at the Cedar Riverside Adult Education Collaborative, my neighbors on the West Bank about whom I knew virtually nothing. I volunteered with Susan's fourth level English language learning class. While I was in the respected position of "teacher," I worked hard to convey the philosophy that I was learning in Eric's class to the East African students who quickly became my friends. I respected their authority as much as my own. "You know my brother, in Africa?" Habiba asked me once over our tea break. "He has two goats and a cow! It is beautiful in my country." Her eyes moved away from mine. She made me want to see the Africa of her memory. (When I lived in Thiès, Sénégal, during my field internship working with talibés and street children, my family owned several goats. One, the mother, was tied to a post near the back porch off of my bedroom. It bayed all night long. I never saw the goat let off its leash.)

Being a part of the MSID Sénégal program fundamentally changed me as a human being. And I cannot say that I am at all certain that my presence there "made a difference." I did not go to Sénégal because I thought that I owed an African country my Western and American services. I traveled to Sénégal to learn, to grow, and to be a positive part of the lives that I touched there and to let the people there be a positive part of mine, if they wanted to be. After having lived in Sénégal, I am a huge opponent of speaking of Africa as if it is one uniform region in distress. Each country is unique. Each country has its own specific set of infrastructural problems. But each country also has amazing histories, perspectives, and ideas that we in the U.S. do not have. In Sénégal there was a sense of community and of valuing relationships over time, money, and productivity that we have, for the most part, lost in this country. These were the values that informed my "extra" work at an unlikely place like an athletic center during my first two and a half years as an undergraduate. These were the values that grew and expanded in Eric's class and that I have lived as a volunteer and senior-year ICEP student at Cedar Riverside. One of the most important aspects of daily life is learning not only to be present in every moment, but to be open to the myriad of other people around you.

In Dakar, after I had returned from my internship and as I was preparing to leave, my little host brother Piyotr wandered into my room. He always had free range of my things. He looked around for them now as he threw himself onto the bed. "La-ri-sa?" In French, I explained to him that I was leaving. I told him that I loved him. When he began to cry, I picked him up and told him he that he was a great strong boy and that it would be all right. Piyotr will be four this year. He may not always remember me. But I will always remember him.

Garski received commencement recognition as a Community Engagement Scholar. She also served as a 2008-09 Department of English peer adviser for undergraduates.