In Which We Have Our First Tea-Debate

Part of our cunning plot to draw students into the library, and get them accustomed to using it, is to have tea-debates within its walls. Tea is a huge Senegalese ritual; they make it in a tiny kettle with a ton of sugar, and serve it in little shot glasses. They fill two shot-glasess half-full, and then gracefully pour long streams of tea from one glass to another, in order to make the tea foam. Then they give you this pretty little glass half-filled with foam and half-filled with this delicious brandy-golden tea. Sometimes they boil fresh mint in it too. Its like drinking liquid candy. Whenever I try to make the foam, I spill boiling water all over myself, clumsy American that I am. Its kind of a skill. But maybe its all right, because its usually the teenage boys who make the tea for the family. Tea parties are very manly here.

We're vexed that the bulk of students who come to our tea debates are boys. We want to have a feminine opinion, but they're hesitant to come, and even more hesitant to speak up in front of the boys. And before you say, "O, what a sexist country," let me tell you something. Even at my "enlightened liberal arts college" I've noticed that boys are far more willing to speak up in class than girls. If you don't believe me, try keeping a tally of how often the boys talk and how often the girls talk. Its shocking.

Anyway, for our first tea debate, we asked the students to suggest topics. They brought up all sorts of great controversies, like early pregancy and polygamy and forced marriage, but they also brought up the whole environmental issue. So we started off by talking about the Protection of Nature. I told them what an ecovillage was, and none of them knew about Guede-Chantier being an ecovillage. The decision to become an ecovillage was made by the village elders, probably so that they could wangle grants out of the Senegalese Ecovillage Network. "Ecovillage" is a Western idea. But "protection of nature," is a more global idea, and we found that the students were very well-informed about it. Emmanuel kept asking them, "What can WE, in Guede-Chantier, do to protect nature?" and they had all sorts of great ideas, like solar ovens and economizing on wood and phasing out chemical fertilizers and planting trees. I asked them if men was there to serve nature, or whether nature was there to serve man. And they replied, quite intelligently, "A little bit of both, but man needs nature more than nature needs him."

Then we progressed to the topic of illegal immigration. Whenever I think about illegal immigration, I always think of the Statue of Liberty and the poem at her base welcoming the hungry hordes to America, the "land of opportunity." The Statue of Liberty is such a liar. Our current immigration laws (especially after the Patriot Act) are pretty damn unwelcoming. And I hate to think of them shooting Mexicans at the border. I read a newspaper article about that once, but when I talked about it with my Bard friends, they were all like, "The US wouldn't shoot people who are just trying to visit!" Ha-ha. Yes they would.

Needless to say, the perspective from the Senegalese side is quite different. To them, illegal immigration is viewed as this risky and dubious adventure that can reap great rewards. From time to time, people leave on these mysterious journeys and come back with their pockets overflowing with dollars, buying new houses and cars and all sorts of shiny toys. Everyone is jealous of them and wishes they were so rich and lucky. But at the same time, they cast a suspicious eye on the person who is bringing back the dollars. Its viewed as a sort of cheating. Why didn't you stay home and earn an honest living? Who KNOWS what you were doing there abroad? Maybe you were doing some sort of ignominious or unclean work.

Also, they are well aware of the dangers of illegal immigration. Boat-owners will take bribes to let you stow away and then shut you up in cartons without food or water. People will perish trying to trek across the desert from Africa to Spain. There's always the police. And then there are the difficulties of orientation when you arrive in the new country; the utter confusion as you try to acclimatize yourself and figure out what's going on...... It just shows how hard life is here, that people are willing to risk all that in order to better their situation.

There was a lot of moralizing at the table about how much better it would be to scrimp your pennies and start your own business in Senegal. If you leave your country, you lose track of your family, you lose track of your values, you lose track of what really matters. People talked about friends and relations who had visited France and came back to Senegal with a high-and-mighty attitude. The tradition here is to have the family eat from one plate (sometimes with hands, sometimes with spoons.) But when people come back from France, they're too good to eat out of the common plate. They whine that its too dirty and they complain about the people who use their hands. Its only one example, but there's all sorts of little things like that.

So much for my opinions. "Everyone should have the right to come to America! Its so unjust that we shut them out!" That's all very well-and-good, but there's a built-in-arrogance to that point of view that I hadn't recognized previously. My assumption was that everyone wants to visit America, that life is better in America than elsewhere. I never thought about immigrants losing their culture and heritage, being cut off from their families. Something sad I heard during the debate is that often its the least favorite child of the family who will undertake the dangerous adventure. If the parents love their siblings more, they will take off to bring back treasures from abroad and win some respect in the family that way. Its often the outcasts who are most willing to take the risks.

The general consensus at the table seemed to be that illegal immigration was only for people who were greedy or desperate. Leaving your country is a painful and wrenching thing. People do it for money or status or (less ignobly) as a recourse against starvation.

I was really pleased in general with how willing the students were to express themselves and how eager they were to share their points of view. We decided to have another tea debate the very next day.