Why Senegal?

If all stories are about leaving home or returning, either Iliad or Odyssey, I wonder if blogs are, too.  In this section I hope to describe if not understand Dakar, Senegal for the next six weeks leading up to their presidential election on February 26^th, 2011.

Sitting to write on this 10 degree morning in Minnesota, a rare January mosquito bounces against the window.  As I start taking anti-malaria pills in a couple of days, this seems somehow ominous.  

So, this leaving contains several stories of course, but I’ll start with a simple one.  About 8 years ago, SPA hosted a Fulbright scholar from Dakar (Pape Diop, a name equivalent to John Smith here) who taught African Literature and French.  He and I became friends and stayed in touch.  We occasionally joked about working together in Dakar some day.  Last year when writing my sabbatical plan, I recalled those jokes and wondered if I could really work with Pape at Cheik Anta Diop University coaching his PhD English Literature students in writing?  On a Skype call last winter, his teaching team agreed to the plan. The opportunity to live in a place like Dakar not as tourist or traveler, but rather as a colleague within a community feels like an amazing chance to reunite with a friend and to have a brief window into the way most of the world lives.  And while I will appreciate January temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s, a coastal location and amazing music, working in the African university system will be a challenge as this NYT article suggests-

http://tinyurl.com/AfricanUniversities.     

Should the university shut down as it did in the last contentions elections, my back-up plan is to work with a middle school teacher I met at the Stanford Design School workshop in June.  But having lived and worked in Greece and Morocco, I already know that best laid plans thing pretty well. If all else fails, I'll drink coffee, run on the beach, and listen to amazing music.  Now that's a back up plan.