Year In Review

I write you from terminal E42 in Charles DeGaul Airport in Paris, on my way home for the summer. On the first flight, and indian guy 2 seats next to me took all 3 of the rows' assigned pillows. A lady just announced that "any luggage left behind will be destroyed by the police" in broken English. But I'm not going to talk about this current trip; there'll be lots of time for that. I am, however, going to look back on the one I just ended- the year long... let's say "experience" in Dakar, Senegal.

I'm not going to lie- it's been a long year. Filled with new faces, disappointments, and power outages, my first year in Dakar, and more importantly at Dakar Academy, has been, well, pretty much what I expected. I knew there would be culture shock in the new country (there always is,) and I like to think I had a pretty shrewd guess that there would be even more in the new school. In a subtle way, Dakar Academy, to me, is much more different from charter than America is from Senegal. The culture is completely different, and maybe it's a Minnesotan thing, but it took a long time to get used to. Honestly, that process is just beginning. I'm positive that in my senior year, something will happen or someone (or ones) will do something at some point that I completely will not understand. The incident with the rat, which I mentioned earlier this year, when someone called "rat!" and every other dude simultaneously jumped up, heaviest object within arm length in hand, and chased it. These things just don't cross my mind. By the way, that rat was like 1 1/2 feet from nose to butt.

Yet therein lies the problem. All this past year, especially during first semester, I've tried to define DA as a group, as a school, as some kind of entity stamping out public displays of affection and anyone who wasn't constantly happy. To an extent, I do think this is entirely the case, with many members of the school teaming up and informing the authorities if they catch any 2 people staring into each others' eyes for too long. The main problem, though, is that I was paying attention to the forest and not the trees. DA is a group of people more than a school, and I don't mean that in a "we're one big family here" kind of way. I'm talking about the DA I was talking about. If there's a whole bunch of people who drive me up the wall and about 5 who dont, it's not fair of me to cast the 5 in a bad light because of their bland, annoying classmates. It's not fair to do that to anyone, really. Except freshman. They probably deserve it.

-Will



"Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway. We're the best of friends, insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way, is on the road again."