DA culture lesson #42: Outreach
Usually twice a year, about 130 students and staff go out to an African village for a weekend and separate into teams to build a church, run drama and VBS skits, run a simple medical clinic, make benches, and sing on evangelism campaigns. Showers and toilets are holes and buckets.
First off, I want to give a disclaimer. This is the only "African" thing I do in Africa. I'm not gonna lie, most of the life the other students at DA and I is spent in the semi-comfortable DA bubble that consists of the school and the small surrounding area (I just couldn't bring myself to type regular-comfortable right then.)
On outreach weekend though, we pack up a couple of big, white, beat up buses called ngagen ngais (pronounced something like jaggen jais) to the brim and pretty much drive to the middle of nowhere. Not quite Timbuktu, that's in the next country over, but the sort of area you might picture it to be. Lots and lots of sand, baobab trees lining the horizon, villages with thatched roofs and not running water or power, we're talkin' the whole nine African yards.
Then we proceed to spend the next couple of days becoming as dirty as one can possibly be. Add cement, sand, mud, lots of unfiltered water to wash with to a teenage dude and you have anyone coming back from outreach who was on foundation. If they were on drama, switch cement with face paint. For benches, think sawdust. I don't even wanna talk about medical.
At night it's time for (sometimes group) bucket showers and an excursion to a Turkish toilet, which sounds much fancier than it actually is. Just in case you don't know (I didn't before I came out here), it's a fancy hole in the ground. Hence the title of the post. After that, we go out even further into nowhere and sing a bunch of songs in something like four or five different languages. On the way back, there's a really good chance a van will get stuck, so the guys get out and push or haul it out of the sand. On Saturday we do it again. On Sunday we head back to Dakar after a two to three hour church service.
While this description may sound kind of negative, the time actually manages to somehow seem almost fun. It's not something I would do for the specific purpose of fun, but it's definitely there. Even though it's gross, tiring, and time-consuming, it's not without positive elements. It's the only time all year I get to see stars-- and man could I see stars, they were amazing. I really enjoy the singing in the evenings. Having a tent filled with Halo Gang members was a blast.
Probably the most interesting things about outreach though surprises me every time I've gone (which is only two at this point). Without fail, and especially this weekend, I experience serious but super-late culture shock. Riding on the back of a pick up truck while the purple-red sun sets on a sparse savanna and a group of birds fly by makes me realize "Holy crap I'm living in Africa" in a way that a city, no matter how un-American, can't. The fact that I'm living on the same continent as lions has probably hit my friends and family in the States more than it's hit me-- I've noticed the effects more than the fact itself.
This is really comforting to me, in a way. Culture shock inherently means that I'm not entirely comfortable here, and though I've grown to appreciate Senegal and DA, and will definitely miss it when I graduate, I still don't think it should feel like home. Call me stubborn, but I don't know that Africa will ever be my "normal." But hey, if "abnormal" is anything like outreach, I'm totally okay with it.
-Will
"Where it began, I can't begin to knowin', but then I know it's growin' strong."
