Gut Feeling

when you stomach tells you to call it quits… get out… my stomach issues started up again a few days ago (I can pretty much only eat bread and bananas sometimes) and, needless to say, Senegal and my bowels are not a match made in heaven… As hard as this is for me to do, it’s time to come home (yes early) It took a crazy day of doctors, taxis, and blood tests to confirm that while, I may love Senegal, my body does not right now. And that’s okay.

Too often study abroad blogs are full of sunsets and people smiling with drinks in hand. Very rarely do you see anything that would contradict that the writer is having the time of their lives. In reality, it’s ups and downs, days spent sick, days spent loving life, and everything in between. For a few weeks now, I’ve felt like I’m failing at everything I’ve set out to do. I don’t feel like myself. I can’t do everything I want to. I’m scared of everything. I haven’t sent a single snapchat (so unlike me!).  It took a long chat with one of my Senegalese friends/teachers/mentors to finally make the hard decision to go home. Needing to go doesn’t make me weak. In fact it makes me stronger to know myself and my limits. Additionally, it confirms that the home I’ve made for myself is a wonderful place to be. In that respect, I’m extremely lucky.

While I will miss the car rapides, the noise around the fruit stands in the morning, and the smells of Dakar (okay maybe not all the smells), the beautiful ocean and it’s breezes, and most of all, my wonderful host family who have adopted me as if I was their own, it’s time. Mostly I have learned that, while it takes bravery to stick out an uncomfortable situation, it takes even more to prioritize yourself and your own health.

Leggi Leggi, Dakar! I hope to return again at a time my body is willing to accept you.

Yow yaa bess!!!! / Le toubab portez une mini-jupe!!!!

Senegal update woo!

@school: drumming classes, history classes, french classes, wolof classes, a visit to the Village des arts, + a tour of Dakar! yay! Also learned the Senegalese version of a “your mom” joke: Lu bess? what’s new? Yow ya bess! you are new! Deedet man bessuma! no, I’m not new! and so on… this can continue for ages!

@home: my host siblings continue to find me fascinating… especially anything to do with my hair. They have: created a dance about towel drying my hair (and shared it with all of the kids in the neighborhood…), begged to brush my hair (one of my sisters enjoys following me around while I get ready in the morning), and wanted to use my shampoo (no! mine). In other news, today I wore a dress that comes to just below my knee. I walked into the kitchen and my host sister screamed: ELLE PORTEZ UNE MINI-JUPE!!!!!! she’s wearing a mini skirt!  (the dress in question has been spotted at many a shabbat service…) There you have it. Senegalese mini-skirt!

Food: the list of new foods include – frozen hibiscus juice in a bag, Lakk (millet with sweet yogurt/milk sauce), goat, hibiscus leaf sauce, some sort of fish/tomato/cassava concoction. Everything here is also super sweet (like whole sugar bowl in your coffee sweet)… may have offended my host mom by only putting one sugar cube in my coffee… Also so much rice + bread!!!! (too much)

You used to call me on my cell phone… men, men, everywhere… handing out cell phone numbers on the street… yay for technology?

All in all a silly few days!

 

Naka waa ker ga? (how is your family?)

Quick update: I have a host family! Yay! I have 3 little sisters and 1 little brother. We live a a very nice house with an orange door about a 15 minute walk from school (thankfully not near a mosque… they are loud!). Everyone speaks French and Wolof (the local language here) My host dad speaks a little English and my little brother has learned some English by listening to Beyonce and Akon songs. (He knows all the words to Flawless… it’s amazing!)

Yesterday while I was unpacking my sisters came in and noticed my sketchbook and art supplies. After a quick look at what was in it, they demanded a pencil and some paper and started drawing pictures. One of my sisters drew a portrait of me and labeled it “Sarah le toubab de Californie. Elle a de beaux cheveux” (Sarah the foreigner/white person from California. She has nice hair)  Afterwards we went to go eat dinner (at 8:30… early for Senegal! thank god there are little kids in my house!) We had some kind of meatballs in spicy tomato sauce and baguette which we ate sitting around a communal platter poking at it with forks. Il etait délicieuse!

Things that are surprising: They have wifi at my homestay… and smart phones… one of the first things my host brother did was ask if I had any games on my phone. When I said no, he called me boring! Clearly technology is universal!

 

A Taste of Norway in 2 Commercials

Hot dogs = Life

Hard butter = tragedy

Good luck, Captain — and make sure to Instagram it: State of the Union 2015

Full text here!

Snippets:

“It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come”

“And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise”

“I intend to protect a free and open internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks, so that the next generation of digital innovators and entrepreneurs have the platform to keep reshaping our world.”

“Of course, if there’s one thing this new century has taught us, it’s that we cannot separate our work at home from challenges beyond our shores.”

“My first duty as Commander-in-Chief is to defend the United States of America. In doing so, the question is not whether America leads in the world, but how. When we make rash decisions, reacting to the headlines instead of using our heads; when the first response to a challenge is to send in our military — then we risk getting drawn into unnecessary conflicts, and neglect the broader strategy we need for a safer, more prosperous world. That’s what our enemies want us to do.”

“When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new.”

“In West Africa, our troops, our scientists, our doctors, our nurses and healthcare workers are rolling back Ebola — saving countless lives and stopping the spread of disease. I couldn’t be prouder of them, and I thank this Congress for your bipartisan support of their efforts. But the job is not yet done — and the world needs to use this lesson to build a more effective global effort to prevent the spread of future pandemics, invest in smart development, and eradicate extreme poverty.”

“no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”

“We defend free speech, and advocate for political prisoners, and condemn the persecution of women, or religious minorities, or people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. We do these things not only because they’re right, but because they make us safer.”

“I know how tempting such cynicism may be. But I still think the cynics are wrong.”

“Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns. Imagine if we did something different.

Understand — a better politics isn’t one where Democrats abandon their agenda or Republicans simply embrace mine.

A better politics is one where we appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears.”

“If we’re going to have arguments, let’s have arguments — but let’s make them debates worthy of this body and worthy of this country.”

” If you share the broad vision I outlined tonight, join me in the work at hand. If you disagree with parts of it, I hope you’ll at least work with me where you do agree. And I commit to every Republican here tonight that I will not only seek out your ideas, I will seek to work with you to make this country stronger.”

What did you all think?

Houston We Have a Problem in Western Asia

Today at work, I had the pleasure of reading the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) report on The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013 (SOFI 2013). Although there are many worthy topics in SOFI 2013, (in fact probably an entire blog’s worth!) I was most struck by the story of Western Asia.

This folks, is Western Asia

 Let’s start at the very beginning with naming. Right off the bat, I noticed (and consequently had to google) that listed among the regions of the world was the mysterious Western Asia. It turns out that this term is just the geographically appropriate & PC way to say “the Middle East”. Now, why would the FAO choose to describe the area as Western Asia. One could simply chalk it up to “geographical accuracy” but I believe something else is at play here. After all, most people are more familiar with using the term “Middle East” and SOFI 2013 is not written so densely that the general public would have a tough time sifting though it. (I actually think the document does a wonderful job of being accessible to the general public. Well done FAO!) 

To shed some light on the word choice, Let’s take a quick look into the findings of SOFI 2013. Just from skiming the first couple of section titles we learn that ALMOST all regions are seeing a drop in hunger but that the improvement is happening at different rates. We, as a whole, are also not on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for hunger, that some countries have already met it, and, though substantial work is needed, the MDG target could be reached. We are then treated to a graph of the uneven progress:

Everywhere seems to be getting better… everywhere except Western Asia. I think this graph perfectly illustrates why the FAO does not say “the Middle East”.

When most people hear “Middle East” there’s a good chance that 

or

or even

is what they think of.

 We see from the previous graph that the Middle East/ Western Asia is THE ONLY REGION doing a backslide. The problem of hunger in the area is actually GETTING WORSE! In a report tackling the already difficult to solve problem of hunger, the last thing that is needed is to remind people of their prejudices. Alleviating world hunger requires ALL hands on deck.    

 

 

 

Informed? really now… Are we resting on nonexistent laurels?

About a week ago, NYT columnist Charles M Blow wrote an op-ed entitled “The Penance of Glenn Beck“. Blow begins with Beck’s confession of contributing to the rift within the political life our country (full interview found here) and winds us through his thoughts on the media and their responsibility to provide accurate news to the public. Alongside the commentary runs an info-graphic/poll entitled “Fox and the Spin“. Towards the end of his musings, Blow finally announces why he included the poll stating:

“In 2012, the year after Beck left his Fox show (which at the time was one of the highest-rated shows in all of cable news), a Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind poll found that people who watched or listened to no news were better informed than those who watched Fox. According to the report, “The largest effect” of a news source “is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all.”

(It should be noted that watching MSNBC also had a “negative impact on people’s current events knowledge,” according to the poll, although it was not as large as the effect of watching Fox.) This study is not the only study that has pointed out that misinformation is consumed by Fox News viewers.”

Well how about that? I’m sure it makes every news reading liberal nearly wet themselves! Fox News, like we’ve been saying for YEARS, is actually factually wrong!

Not so fast… let’s check out the numbers… The poll describes itself as “average number of correct answers to five questions about domestic affairs by respondents’ source of news”  Down at the bottom it will tell you that ” a total of 1185 respondents were polled”  Basics out of the way, let’s dive into the research.

Starting from the 1st result: NPR listeners answered an average of 1.51 questions right (out of 5) it’s crystal clear that something is majorly wrong! It seems that those decided as the MOST INFORMED were not even able to answer 2 questions right out of 5! 2/5? On a school exam that’s referred to as failing.

I think we can all stop patting ourselves on the back now… if this study (and I do acknowledge that it is only one study!) is any sort of a litmus test of how informative America’s news sources are, our problems loom larger than we accounted for. It’s not just Fox who is failing us.

is making art all that newspapers are useful for? I hope not!