Off to Louga
Hello all,
I’ve been travelling quite a bit recently, and not just to the usual haunts.
I recently returned from Louga, a city of 150,000 people. Louga is a regional capital about a hundred miles north of where I live. In size, stature, and situation, the city is just about average, which is probably why it was chosen for Jeffery Sachs’ Millenium Cities Project. The Millenium Cities Project is supposed to monitor and ensure that countries are meeting the Millenium Development Goals, the set of benchmarks in health, education, and so forth set by the UN for the year 2015. For those unfamiliar with Jeffrey Sachs, he’s an economist and recent champion of Africa in the media. He’s frequently in the company of Bono, a non-economist and other recent champion of Africa in the media.
Whenever I go to Louga I’m always struck by something in the atmosphere that depresses me a bit. It is mostly treeless, sandy, and rough around the edges, with a decaying grandiosity perhaps not intended by the local religious leader who planned its streets. Though Louga is just like everywhere else in Senegal, there is a greater sense there of biding time than almost anywhere else I’ve visited in country.
On visits I stay with the volunteer who lives and works there, in her room inside the compound of a large family. During lunch time, the whole family comes out to eat in a crowd of children, about six women, and exactly no men. The children are sent primarily from destitute relatives, who live poor in nearby villages. They are the product of uneducated girls, large families, pregnancies in teenage years, out of wedlock or to young men without jobs. The Louga family is obliged to open its doors and welcome any family member that wants a meal or a place to stay, but the family is too big to be responsible for everyone. The parents send their child away to the family in Louga, so they’re not responsible for these children either.
The women of the Louga family are all married. Their men are away, working in Dakar, New York, Italy, France, Spain. They are selling hand bags or laying bricks, earning enough money to feed a mass of children and support six women. Indeed, this is unexceptional. Families are large, and work is scarce. Emigration, with the right underground connections, is easy and visas are awarded seemingly without rhyme or reason.
Louga has some beautiful houses, paid for with money selling handbags or laying bricks. Louga, too, has beautiful girls, who won’t even think about marrying a man unless he’s working abroad or soon will be- or is about to be the father of a child. With little commerce, the town has many banks packed with people. The queues are in front of the Western Union or Moneygram booths. The ambition and money lay elsewhere, the women and children here.
But what else can you do? Work in the market for two dollars a day? Farm in a country that lacks rain 8 months of the year? Marry a farmer? Decisions are made either by parents in families who understand the realities of their situation, or by girls at sixteen who don’t.
Oftentimes, when journalists write about AIDS in Africa, they go to a local village and report that all they find there are children and the elderly. We are led to believe that AIDS has devastated the social fabric of this continent, emptying the villages of the young and able. But in reality, the villages have been emptying for decades, while at the same time filling with children and the elderly. Immigration, to the big cities and beyond, felled the village. Numerically, villages may now be larger, but they are smaller, less viable places to live.
Louga has everything that my town lacks- internet, restaurants, hotels- but it is fundamentally just a big village. My town is blessed to be a real town; the men have jobs and live with their families. Some commute long distances, some have factory jobs, some vend, and some work in offices. Some even make daily fortunes in Dakar and commute back at night. Of course, many work abroad, but some come home to start real enterprises. Wives who work choose to have two or three children, and send their kids go to school. There is everything else here, good and bad, that there is everywhere else in Senegal, but amazingly, people can make a real life under their feet.
Africa will develop when its citizens can make a life under their own feet; It will develop when men need not travel to do real work, teenage girls have something more to look forward to than getting married and having children young, and parents have a reason and the means to send their children to school. It will develop when large families no longer live off of the one who makes it, and every individual makes his own way in the world. There is nothing terribly unusual in all this- we see glimpses of it every day.
When I look at the country or the continent as a whole, the answers seem so simple. But when I look at individuals and how they’re living their lives, running their businesses, or raising their children, I’m at a loss as to what they could do better, how I can help them, or how anyone else can either. Undoubtedly, the Jeffrey Sachs’ and the Bonos of the world also have a solution for Africa. They must also certainly lack one for Africans.
The key to development, paradoxically, is development itself. The situation must change for the individual to change, and the individual must change for the situation to change. How this can happen is anybody’s guess.
I’ve been travelling quite a bit recently, and not just to the usual haunts.
I recently returned from Louga, a city of 150,000 people. Louga is a regional capital about a hundred miles north of where I live. In size, stature, and situation, the city is just about average, which is probably why it was chosen for Jeffery Sachs’ Millenium Cities Project. The Millenium Cities Project is supposed to monitor and ensure that countries are meeting the Millenium Development Goals, the set of benchmarks in health, education, and so forth set by the UN for the year 2015. For those unfamiliar with Jeffrey Sachs, he’s an economist and recent champion of Africa in the media. He’s frequently in the company of Bono, a non-economist and other recent champion of Africa in the media.
Whenever I go to Louga I’m always struck by something in the atmosphere that depresses me a bit. It is mostly treeless, sandy, and rough around the edges, with a decaying grandiosity perhaps not intended by the local religious leader who planned its streets. Though Louga is just like everywhere else in Senegal, there is a greater sense there of biding time than almost anywhere else I’ve visited in country.
On visits I stay with the volunteer who lives and works there, in her room inside the compound of a large family. During lunch time, the whole family comes out to eat in a crowd of children, about six women, and exactly no men. The children are sent primarily from destitute relatives, who live poor in nearby villages. They are the product of uneducated girls, large families, pregnancies in teenage years, out of wedlock or to young men without jobs. The Louga family is obliged to open its doors and welcome any family member that wants a meal or a place to stay, but the family is too big to be responsible for everyone. The parents send their child away to the family in Louga, so they’re not responsible for these children either.
The women of the Louga family are all married. Their men are away, working in Dakar, New York, Italy, France, Spain. They are selling hand bags or laying bricks, earning enough money to feed a mass of children and support six women. Indeed, this is unexceptional. Families are large, and work is scarce. Emigration, with the right underground connections, is easy and visas are awarded seemingly without rhyme or reason.
Louga has some beautiful houses, paid for with money selling handbags or laying bricks. Louga, too, has beautiful girls, who won’t even think about marrying a man unless he’s working abroad or soon will be- or is about to be the father of a child. With little commerce, the town has many banks packed with people. The queues are in front of the Western Union or Moneygram booths. The ambition and money lay elsewhere, the women and children here.
But what else can you do? Work in the market for two dollars a day? Farm in a country that lacks rain 8 months of the year? Marry a farmer? Decisions are made either by parents in families who understand the realities of their situation, or by girls at sixteen who don’t.
Oftentimes, when journalists write about AIDS in Africa, they go to a local village and report that all they find there are children and the elderly. We are led to believe that AIDS has devastated the social fabric of this continent, emptying the villages of the young and able. But in reality, the villages have been emptying for decades, while at the same time filling with children and the elderly. Immigration, to the big cities and beyond, felled the village. Numerically, villages may now be larger, but they are smaller, less viable places to live.
Louga has everything that my town lacks- internet, restaurants, hotels- but it is fundamentally just a big village. My town is blessed to be a real town; the men have jobs and live with their families. Some commute long distances, some have factory jobs, some vend, and some work in offices. Some even make daily fortunes in Dakar and commute back at night. Of course, many work abroad, but some come home to start real enterprises. Wives who work choose to have two or three children, and send their kids go to school. There is everything else here, good and bad, that there is everywhere else in Senegal, but amazingly, people can make a real life under their feet.
Africa will develop when its citizens can make a life under their own feet; It will develop when men need not travel to do real work, teenage girls have something more to look forward to than getting married and having children young, and parents have a reason and the means to send their children to school. It will develop when large families no longer live off of the one who makes it, and every individual makes his own way in the world. There is nothing terribly unusual in all this- we see glimpses of it every day.
When I look at the country or the continent as a whole, the answers seem so simple. But when I look at individuals and how they’re living their lives, running their businesses, or raising their children, I’m at a loss as to what they could do better, how I can help them, or how anyone else can either. Undoubtedly, the Jeffrey Sachs’ and the Bonos of the world also have a solution for Africa. They must also certainly lack one for Africans.
The key to development, paradoxically, is development itself. The situation must change for the individual to change, and the individual must change for the situation to change. How this can happen is anybody’s guess.
posted by Unknown at 8:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home