Third-world technology is not an oxymoron

A young man listens to a borrowed iPod Shuffle on a bus ride from a small village in Senegal.

By KATE SHELLNUTT
The Virginian-Pilot

DAKAR, Senegal — I wiggled my flash drive, full of digital pictures, into the computer in front of me and began to type an e-mail as Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” played on repeat in the background. For a second, I forgot where I was .

Then I looked at what I’d just typed on the screen: “Fq;ily1 iùve ,issed you...”

The French keyboard at my fingertips, which scrambled what I meant to type, the dirt at my feet, my frizzing hair, that dusty smell of incense that never went away … it didn’t take much to remind me that I was in Africa and not my home in Virginia Beach or my dorm room at Washington and Lee University in Lexington.

This spring, I spent six weeks in Dakar, Senegal. Each week, I spent about two hours in a cybercafe in my neighborhood, sending e-mail updates to my parents, talking on instant messenger with my friends and submitting class assignments online. For less than 50 cents an hour, I surfed the almost-high-speed Internet alongside dozens of young Africans.

Before I left for Senegal back in April, I knew that life there was going to be different. But as I saw kids downloading music at cybercafes, people carrying cell phones, vendors selling Quiksilver and Tommy Hilfiger clothing, Mercedes-Benzes driving downtown and families eating dinner while watching the 9 o’clock news, I began to wonder if life was really that different on the other side of the Atlantic.

It’s a complicated comparison to make. In some ways, the United States isn’t years “ahead” of Senegal; Africa isn’t “behind” the West. Using 21st-century technology, Africa is taking a different path, skipping steps the West took.

Cell phone service extends across nearly all of Senegal, even into regions that have never seen telephone lines. Remote villages I visited, such as Mbam along the Sine Saloum delta, have installed solar panels for lighting, but may never be wired for electricity.

“We have been told that people out there think we live in trees and caves. I’m glad you saw for yourself that we are up-to-date,” said Steve Tawiah, a friend I met in Senegal. He’s an English teacher from Ghana who lived about 10 minutes from my host home.

Since I returned to the United States, I’ve paid special attention to the news coverage of Africa on TV and in magazines. Even when stories show one of the continent’s more developed countries, another element, tragedy or political conflict trumps the prosperity it enjoys.

“Third-world technology” is not an oxymoron. In Senegal, the Internet has become overwhelmingly popular, with blogs, weather updates, African music charts, job listings and e-mail sites designed especially for the country’s 482,000 regular Internet users.

One in 10 homes has a TV, and though satellite is an option, most can afford only the two cable channels. The state-owned station plays “The Wayans Bros.” and other sitcoms dubbed in French, as well as daily news. The other channel features local musicians who sing in native languages.

What makes Senegal so interesting is that modernization isn’t the country’s only priority. Instead, Senegalese culture fuses Western, Muslim and African influences in everyday life.

Some of my favorite memories come from these juxtapositions: A Senegalese businessman checks his e-mail on his way home from the mosque a block away. A woman talks on her cell phone as she shops in the market with a baby wrapped to her back. A teen sends text messages after school from the back of a rusty, colorfully painted public bus, known in Senegal by its French name: “car rapide.”

The same families that watch TV at dinner each night cook their food over a makeshift gas stove and eat communally “around the bowl.” They do laundry once a week by hand. They often go without electricity and water because of the overwhelming demand for utilities in Dakar.

Though Senegal can boast about the cell phone selection and coverage or accessibility to the Internet in the country, it still struggles to provide some basic needs. And it was the absence of basics, not the absence of technology, that made me feel occasionally annoyed, uncomfortable or unsafe there.

Many citizens have been talking about public sanitation since Youssou N’Dour, an internationally known Senegalese musician, began the “Set Setaal” or “Be Clean” movement, but the country has yet to develop an organized trash collection system. In the meantime, people just litter. Everywhere. Piles of Fanta cans, packing boxes and pieces of newspaper fill gutters on city streets and fenced-in stretches of desert.

In the neighborhoods surrounding Dakar, talibe – children enrolled in certain Quranic schools – collect money for their school’s leader. Under this institutionalized begging system, the talibes aren’t treated well, but because the begging is done for religious ends (to teach children the Muslim ideals of submission and sacrifice), the government cannot regulate it.

Senegal has health centers in its cities and smaller clinics in rural areas, but treatment options don’t seem adequate for the country’s serious health threats, such as malaria, dehydration, typhoid fever, cholera and diseases from parasites . Fortunately, vaccines, medications and a cautionary diet kept me from getting sick; however, when I got a bad cut on my leg, I ended up getting stitches in a three-room Senegalese clinic, then bribing the doctor to provide documentation of my injury.

The nickel-sized scar on my right shin reminds me of the sub-par health care system in Senegal and of the basics many Africans must do without.

The weekly e-mails from my friend Steve remind me of the busy cybercafes, of the way Senegal has embraced communications technology.

Both the scar and the e-mails keep me from forgetting my experience in Africa, six weeks of expecting the unexpected and learning to respect it.

Kate Shellnutt, a junior at Washington & Lee University, is interning with The Virginian-Pilot’s business team this summer.