my 10 Days Adventure in African Jungles
Hello everybody; family, friends and stangers. My hope through this post is that we can share our expereinces, thoughts and stories with all of you while I'm on a different continent. Though my insight of Senegal will be based from the view of a foreigner, I hope it sheds some light about life in a country very different from ours. I also hope that through sharing, my experiences won't be so disconnected from all the people I love being connected to.
This may be one of first posts that I write about Africa and the amazing trip that I have had here. Things are wrapping up so quickly here and I feel like our time is being cut shorter that it already is. The day before our big presentations to the community, we had to meet in the morning and talk about what to expect for the full day of presentations. We pretty much worked all day on slideshows that simplified the messages of our results of research so that the community could understand what we did and what we found in the process. We had to practice the speeches in the afternoon, but it was literally a disaster. We practiced with a translator that was not the best at doing so, so one presentation alone took over an hour. Trying to words things in a way that the translator understands is harder than it seems, and we had to write down scripts of how to word things for the next day. As soon as we got the presentation together, we hit the sack in preparation for what was sure to be a very full and very long day.
We woke up the next day, ate a quick breakfast, and started preparing for our guests to arrive. We had to move tables and chairs all over camp to have enough room for the people that we invited. We had to set up a projector in the dining hall, curtains to block out the bright sunlight and some heat, and food tables since we would be serving our guests lunch. I also had to meet with the translator we would be using and go over the PowerPoint with him so that he would be able to make sense of it when explaining it to the community. It was a very full morning, and by ten when the guests started arriving, I was so excited to get things moving.
My group was the first group to go and we all gave our presentation together because each of our studies supported one giant finding at the end. Our presentation took a total of 45 minutes and I loved every second of it. The translator we had was fantastic at understanding what we were trying to say, and I felt like it was so great to be sharing all this information we collected with the people who it affects the most! I couldn’t help but be happy to see over 50 community members looking back at me and wanting to know what we had been working on for the last several weeks! Never did I think I would have the chance to present research in a different country with a translator assisting me, and I was so thankful for the experience to do so, even though it was more difficult than I thought. The community really seemed to appreciate the hard work we had done, and they asked great questions that we did a pretty good job answering overall.
To be continued ...