The sky a streaky slate, I can still make out bats in their nightly flight, winging their way towards dinner across the rooftops. I finish filling a bucket at the faucet out back and bring it inside to fill up my water filter, passing my brother as he wipes the crumbs from his evening breakfast off of the table and onto a metal platter. Every day sunset comes one minute earlier, so the rest of us are done already with our coffee and bread, the time for breaking fast now almost a half an hour ahead of where we started over three weeks ago. Seven-thirty doesn’t seem so late for the sun to be setting, and I am startled to realize we are nearing October, and in other parts of the world that means it’s almost autumn. Here though the only signs of changing seasons are the growing number of sunny days, clouds higher in the sky, fewer power outages, and increasingly frequent talk of going back to school.
It was perfect timing then when Wednesday just before sunset a truck showed up at the community center in town loaded full with boxes of school supplies. Through a work connection with the city’s main women’s group, a Spanish NGO had generously sent the materials by boat from the Canary Islands, and I was called in by the adjunct mayor to help supervise the receipt of the donation, inventory everything, and help decide how it should be divided up between the city’s schools.
When the head of the women’s group said she wanted my help, my first thought was actually, “great, as if I don’t already have enough work…” but once we started inventorying I felt proud to have been called into action as a privileged party, and could not deny the importance of the job I was being asked to do. An elite group we were, just three ladies from the women’s group, my counterpart and the ministry of youth agent, my counterpart’s son and the community center caretaker. The men did most of the lifting and sorting while the women scanned contents and labeled boxes. I kept notes on how many boxes of each kind of material we had, and also served as a kind of cultural anthropologist, as a few items were not so familiar to the Senegalese. I almost laughed out loud when the head of the women’s group triumphantly declared a particular box to be full of cans of disinfectant, when upon closer inspection I found it in fact to be hundreds of bottles of spray-on fake snow. I had a hard time explaining the exact purpose of that one to people who’ve never seen snow except on TV and who don’t even live in houses with glass windows.
Besides the excitement of knowing that so many more kids would be better equipped for learning this school year, I was thoroughly amused at the range of materials that these Europeans had deemed “out-dated” and “give-away”, laughing at how similar all of them were to what I knew growing up. I was transported back to third grade by a box of double-side holed, connected-but-perforated-at-the-top-and-bottom computer paper, as I remembered vividly the printer for our old Mac LCII using it when I was still playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” on a black-and-white screen.
Watching these Senegalese discover their treasure was like seeing a group of scientists uncover a lost civilization, and I was the time-traveler caught in the middle, translating. But even with my intervention, it became evident that not everything would be used here as it had been intended there. A case of miniature magnifying glasses was not set aside for science classes but instead labeled “toys,” and glossy fax paper rolls were proclaimed “wrapping paper.” Poster paper, I was told, was not used for collages or science fairs but generally folded in half to make folders, and rubber bands were set aside to give to hairdressing salons - “for braiding.” Fortunately notebooks and pens are timelessly fashionable, even if everyone in Spain is long done being excited by Bon Jovi three-ring binders and Ricky Martin pencil cases.
After two days of systematic work, I counted a total of 475 boxes, give or take a few, including:
103 boxes of assorted kinds of binders and folders
52 boxes notebooks
26 boxes markers
25 boxes pens
5 cases pencil cases
5 boxes erasers
2 boxes push-pins
1 box kids backpacks
2 boxes mechanical pencil lead
0 boxes mechanical pencils
2 boxes fake snow
The tricky part now will be the dividing of the bounty, for which I’m sure there will be much discussion and hopefully not too much begging. (FYI there are 7 primary schools in my city, 3 middle schools and a high school.) So I’m interested to see how it’s going to go, and whether or not it will all just be given away, or if it will be, as one of the women mentioned, sold at a very minimal price. This was my first hands-on experience with charitable aid, and my only big let-down was my surprise at how little time it took the receivers of that aid to go from being excited over the gift to being critical of its contents. No sooner had we gotten fifty boxes in that they started to complain that there were too many binders, and in the end they were disappointed because there were no shoes. We were standing in a room half full to the ceiling with boxes of things they had just been given, and there they were looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. It made me just a little bit more jaded about development work.
I was also deeply saddened to learn that the Smurf pens didn’t work.
On the upside, a few thoughts:
1. Fasting is much easier when you spend the day doing interesting work.
2. “Boligrafo” is the word for pen in Spanish, and “archivadore” means binder.
3. “Mee-Kay” is a well-known character even in West Africa, as long as you don’t pronounce his name “Mickey”.
