For The Ambiguity by Cheyenne

For The Ambiguity by Cheyenne - June 2013 Scholarship Essay

As most of you know, I have just returned from an 8 month fellowship in one of the most rural and religiously-motivated villages in Senegal, West Africa.
But today, I am not going to write about issues facing Senegal or about politics. I would have loved to do that about a year ago: I promise I have more to offer today. This is not an essay about development.It is not an essay at all, but a reflection about personal development, about why I deserve, need, and value endlessly my soon-to-be college experience.
But first, let's talk about how I got here.
Let me give you some context into my life for the past 32 weeks. My senegalese name is Khady Jatou, a name that was easier spoken than lived. See, she was the first wife of Mohammed and the vision of a perfect woman in Senegalese society. She cooked plentifully, cleaned perfectly, and submitted to her elders. I lived in a family of 27 children, 3 mothers, and my father. We lived in a concrete building, though we cooked, ate, and showered in the sand. I worked in a turtle conservatory, taking responsibility of the nursery, the specialty and quarantine areas, a tree nursery, and a program to promote natural medicine within the village. I walked to work which was located in the outskirts of my village. I left before the sun got too hot for me to work and so that I had time to have tea with my brothers before lunch was finished. I was the only white in the village. 
My first accomplishment may have been bartering with cab drivers. Making friends. Maybe the time I chased a viper off of the reserve. I learned to carefully prepare soil and how much water to give a seedling. I learned to scale trees and to use their branches for toothbrushes. I was cradled by my mother in sickness and cradled my nephew in his. I finished my first French novel and gave my first English course in Wolof. Yet, all these accomplishments I am proud of, and all the parts of my life abroad, could seem so insignificant. 
I didn't change the world. I didn't suffer. I wasn't scared. I never worked for an aid or development organization. I experienced the underlying economic, social, and political afflictions of Senegal, and yet I was happy, and life went on for me and for the people around me. So, upon returning, I felt a little awkward and a little guilty explaining my experience. I couldn't sum it up in a word when the world asked me "How was Senegal?" 
But I shouldn't hate the silence where everyone expects an answer.
Because I lived the experience, and I still can't classify it. And for some things in life, there just are no answers. I may not have searched for the "answers", and I never tried to change the world. I sat quietly, ran through the desert, and watched the stars to please my heart and solidify my being. I wanted to find me. In that process alone, I found some, yet not all, truths. Truths about Senegalese society that could never be handed to me, could never be read, could never be bought. Answers to problems I could never have even dreamt of. They showed themselves to me because I was there: I showed up and waited, even though sometimes I wasn't even sure what exactly I was waiting for. 
I worked at the turtle village for 7 months before the president told me to follow him. I had followed the same routine everyday, never straying too far off of the trail. Yet I thought I had seen it all. I had chased snakes, found escaped turtles, and went searching for the perfect medicinal seeds. And yet, he kept walking, as I followed: walking, walking, walking. I had never seen this end of the reserve. Everything was dead here. Hay, and dried weeds that may have sprouted during the wet season 6 months before. No water means no life, except for the baobabs, which grow in the desert sand and don't drink water from the ground to form their dry, powdery fruits.
In the distance, I saw something green. We kept walking toward it. I stepped in the scattered fur of a dead donkey: bitten by a snake. Maybe he was trying to get to that patch, too. But in any case, I made it, and he didn't. I was brought to a four-leaf clover patch, the most beautiful speak of luck in a land of dry death. I returned there everyday after work: to read, to think.
This was my patch; belonging to me as much as it had belonged to the Senegalese. Yet, this piece of beauty; this hidden spot of life and happiness, was kept hidden until I had earned the right to know the path. This is the beauty about the Wolof. I couldn't have searched for the path to something I knew never existed.
Yet, because I had patience; because I listened and didn't ask; because I showed up even when it was cancelled, I found the path to beauty in a foreign culture: weather that beauty take the form of a four-leaf clover patch or the tears of my father as the taxi drove away to the airport.
I learned to stop believing in the quest to end ambiguity. Let's stop defining, stop solving, stop categorizing and problem-solving our own experiences, and even worse, the world of which we are not aware. Let's stop asking the questions, "How was Africa?" "How was your day?" I love the ambiguity while it lasts. And I thank God when I learn something new that came by fate and not by force. 
I'm talking about mindfulness: a state of self-awareness, of purposeful being, that allows us to discover the world by becoming solid in ourselves.
So that's the wisdom I have gained and that drives me, like a stake, into University. My mother and father never got the chance to be messaged by the poetry of Dylan Thomas. They never got to run next to the monuments to the beat of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major in sunrise. They were never mentored by Bobby Kennedy or abused by Poe. They couldn't love the ambiguity of learning because somewhere in the process of raising two kids and trying to make ends meet, ambiguity doesn't agree with survival.
I want to love the worthless information that I will never use. I want to eat dinner with my professors and learn to dance the meringue. I want to travel to nations I may never visit again. I want to live, for a few more years, in the world of the undefined and unwritten. Then, one day, when my true calling rings, I will answer. But I don't want to go searching through the phonebook. 
I leave you with a poem by Rilke that was given to me by my mentor the day I returned, a poem that rings true in my heart, which loves the question and loves the ambiguity in my silence:
 
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can
to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms,
like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers.
They can not be given to you. 
Because you could not live them.
It is a question of experiencing absolutely everything…
You need to live the questions.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answers.