lightbulb debate

Electricity. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it?? I had an interesting evening several weeks ago. A car battery materialized in my compound, and out of nowhere my older brother produced a television set and jeri-rigged it to the battery and some sort of metal contraption that one can only assume was the antenna. And presto-chango, we had TV. Thirty or forty kids instantly rushed in to crowd around and watch. (Disclaimer: Senegal was playing in the Africa Cup, so this was a bit of an event) In sharp contrast to this scene, my friend Fatou, a young mother maybe in her early twenties, was sitting next to me with a dim flashlight, clearly running low on precious battery power, trying to read a basic French instructional lent to her by one of the children still in school in her compound. The television set’s sudden assault on my visual and auditory senses, paired with Fatou’s indifference to the show and dedication to her reading got me thinking. What’s so great about electricity anyways?

A year ago now, I moved to a small Senegalese village to live in a small cement hut with no electricity. Coming from our over-stimulated American culture of 24-hour news cycles, BBM-ing, and iPads, it was the antithesis of my previous lifestyle. Talk about being unplugged. It comes with its difficulties, of course.  I seem to be completely unable to keep my phone (a Nokia throwback to the 90s btw) charged, despite a solar charger and an ample supply of the blazing African sun (though in all fairness, I do talk on the phone a lot…), I have to hoard battery power on my iPod for emergencies, like the nights when the mosquitoes just won’t let up on the buzzing, and if I have a question or want to know something I have to actually write it down and google it later. What a life, right?

I should mention here, that this is, of course, a flight of fancy, an exercise in thought. Are any of those things that I mentioned hardships? No, of course not. I do just fine without having Kanye or Florence available to me twenty four hours a day. The reality of it is that life without electricity has an entirely different meaning for my villagers. It means that women in my village who go into labor in the middle of the night do so by flashlight; that children studying for their end of the year exams do so by a burning candle or the moon light; that radios are the main form of mass media; that women cooking after dark chop onions by the light of the fire they are cooking over. And it means that a moto with a broken headlight has a much harder time looking out for stray donkeys and children.

Electricity could fix this. But what has it meant so far? When a few affluent community members invested in the village’s first solar panel, instead of going to our dilapidated health hut, it went to the freshly painted mosque, so the call to prayer can echo through the village five times a day. It means when a car battery shows up, it’s to power up a TV or speakers for a ‘fete.’ So this brings me back to the original question. Would I like to see my village have access to electricity during the rest of my service here? No, not really. A bit counter-intuitive for a grass-roots development worker, no?

Let me explain that one a bit. In reality, of course electricity would be a huge gain for my village, and there would most definitely be increases in the standard of living here. But if economics taught me anything, it is that in the real world there is always a cost associated with a gain. And what exactly is that cost? My road town has electricity, and my visits with friends there have helped to illuminate what goes on in Senegal when cracking peanuts isn’t your only option for the afternoon. They watch TV. And then, they watch some more. And a little bit later, a little bit more. I have seen an eighty year old woman sit in front of a television and watch Indian soap operas for 4 hours. I have watched a group of people crowd into a dark room to watch TV while drinking the traditional tea, attaya, instead of sitting around and conversing, which, culturally, is the whole point of attaya anyways. I’ve seen a four year old kick and scream, and cry and wail because her grandmother won’t change the channel. You know what that sounds like to me? It sounds a bit like America…

I know that I am being a bit judgmental here. But it’s because I don’t like what I am seeing. I came here to delve into Senegalese culture, and when you see it being changed and altered like this, it makes you a little uneasy. I am also being rather hypocritical, because I love going into my regional house and watching a movie or two. But for me, it is an enclave into my own culture for a few hours, and for the Senegalese it is a new development that is being assimilated into their culture. And I am not saying that it is a horrible thing, that Senegalese shouldn’t have TV. They should. It’s great. But again, going back to trusty economics, there are costs involved. Culturally, family interactions are decreased; traditions like attaya are fundamentally altered. “Westernized” images pour forth from the screen. (Westernization is quite the buzz word nowadays, and I really don’t want to get into it here, let’s just say that they certainly aren’t watching portrayals of village life when they watch their soaps.) I’ve seen American, British, French and Indian programs shown. And, consequently, I see a lot of sai-sai high schoolers walking around in skinny jeans and halter tops – quite the opposite of a pagne. There is a health concern as well. Through some turn of events, as Senegal has progressed through the years, a sign of wealth has become the consumption of rice and oil. And anyone who’s ever witnessed the luxury of a Bollywood soap knows that when you got it, you flaunt it. That has led to a rapid increase in the consumption of white rice that is cooked with loads of oil (i.e. the national dish of ceeb u jen, pronounced cheb, that is white rice, cooked in oil with fish and some veggies on top). That can lead to increases in diabetes, heart disease, all of which are the sad consequences of moving from a locally based diet, such as millet, corn, vegetables, to an imported one (read: Thai rice). We make  jokes about ‘ceeb mamas,’ the women with jaifundes (big butts) that you always inevitably get shoved between in a sept place, but it is more devastating when it is a 6-8 month old baby who looks the same size as a five year old.

So why is this happening? Is there a solution? Because we all know electricity is the next step, that one day it will be ubiquitous. I can’t really answer that question. But when sitting and thinking about it (I have ample time to sit and think here), my mind led me to a theory that I learned back in school – the technology leap.

Basically, what the technology leap refers to is how developing countries are able to ‘leap’ over certain technologies to more current ones due to their availability in the world market. The perfect example of this is cell phones. You don’t see a proliferation of land lines in Senegal, because by the time that became something realizable, cell phones were beginning to take hold. What you see today is a very minimal presence of land lines, whereas everyone and their grandma has a cell phone. Of course, technology leap could also be used to mean that while they have to technology, the appropriate education for it was ‘leaped’ over. I thought my mom back home was cell phone illiterate (sorry mom!), but you should see my Senegalese mom here (part of that is because she is actually illiterate, in French at least, but you get my point). Both, however are fiercely possessive of their right to this technology, as they should be. The problem that you see here, and in much of Africa, is that these technologies are dropped in, made desirable and into status symbols, but with no explanation. Like I said, everyone and their grandma has a cell phone, but who knows how to use them? My seventeen year old sister who is in middle school knows how to use a cell phone here almost better than I do, but does she have one? No, of course not. She’s a child. Her fifty-something year old mom, however, has the means to purchase one, but is lost without someone to help her. I cannot tell you how many times a day someone from the ‘grandma set’ asks me to reset the time on their portables.

What compounds this is the fact that cell phone usage in developing countries has enormous potential. We all saw how new media, which included the wide-spread proliferation of cell phones, ignited the Arab Spring. While that is an extreme, it is a perfect example of the sudden onslaught of person to person communication. Ten years ago my mom here could only talk to her older sister by walking 5k to see her. Now she can call. It means everyone has access to an ambulance, that political rallies can be organized (something I have been witnessing first hand, as Senegal is just wrapped up a contentious election.). Banking is also a potential for cell phone usage. When I was in Ghana I learned that many people there are able to send and receive money through their phones, almost utilizing them as ATMs. (http://www.theafricareport.com/index.php/2012012450179876/technology/mobile-phone-banking-and-remittances-an-african-boom-50179876.html) The catch is that you have to be able to use them.

There is a recognized need for this education, especially because it mostly affects women, who either never made it past primary school, or are taken out at an early age for cultural reasons or marriage. Even in the older crowd, most men that you encounter know their way around a phone, as they had the advantage of learning some French in their youth. Tostan,  an organization that focuses a lot on women’s rights and works all across West Africa, but began here in Senegal, has a component to their program where they teach women how to use their phones, whether it be saving a number, writing a text, or checking how much credit they have.

Computers also pose a similar problem. In today’s world, if you want to move upwards and onwards exposure to a computer is key, even in Senegal. An impressive number of computer relics make it to Africa one way or another (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/08/04/magazine/20100815-dump.html), and many are donated through programs such as the World Computer Exchange (http://www.worldcomputerexchange.org/). This is the type of technology leap that can produce positive results, again with the proper education. I am lucky enough to have had a computer in my house since as far back as I can remember. As a result, I could sit down at any computer, pretty much anywhere, and know how to use it. An indispensible skill in the modern job market. That’s not true of a fifteen year old girl in middle school who spends most of her time doing laundry. Teach her how to use a computer and she has a tangible skill that puts her far ahead of her peers, which can lead to remarkable places down the road. That is the rationale behind sending computers to places like Senegal, but in these cases, the education matters even more. Most teachers in Senegal don’t even have a high school degree, let alone exposure to a computer. Last fall I participated in an USAID sponsored summer camp for middle school kids, and one of the sessions was computer skills. It was all ‘back-to-basics,’ teaching the kids how to highlight, change fonts & sizes, colors, spacing, how to save and open. And this was with kids who had used a computer before. Programs that bring the technology need to bring the knowledge as well, otherwise they might as well end up in a spare-parts graveyard. 

So what does this rant on technology come down to? Not much. Unfortunately, there is no unifying theory of everything here. It means that everyone needs to keep doing what they are doing, pushing technology forward, and teaching the world how to use it to make all of our lives better. Will electricity come to my village? Yes. All I can do is hope that they use it to their best advantage. In the mean time, I can let Fatou borrow one of my flashlights, and help her to learn a little French.