Impromptu Astronomy

                Last night was one of the greatest nights of my time in Africa thus far. I did what I consider to be important work, teaching a valuable subject, in a way that inspires further discussion and hopefully a nice dose of awe, in a completely casual and spontaneous context. I truly think some of my most valuable contributions occur in this exact way. So, what happened? At about 10:30 I decided to go find people to sit with. As the nights are getting “cold” (what? It’s like, cool enough that my skin is cool to the touch, but only occasionally light-sweater-cold), fewer and fewer people are out this late. But I found a group of young men from my neighborhood and sat with them. They’re lovely boys, and this may be pushing a cultural boundary, but, well, ::shrug::. For whatever reason, my friend Pape Gaye asked me “do they have the moon in America?” This led me to explain that the earth is a ball that the moon spins around, so yes, they have the moon everywhere. Rather than simply “ahh”-ing and shrugging it off, it peaked their interest. Which got me all excited. So I explained how the moon reflects the light of the  sun, and sometimes the earth gets in the way and casts a shadow, which accounts for the phases of the moon, approximately once per month. They talked amongst themselves, and I picked up “So, the earth doesn’t move, but the moon goes around it.” Oh, but wait! I thought. So, We got into the whole solar system. The sun is the only one that doesn’t move. I needed another friend to give me his hand to be the sun while I used my two hands as the earth and the moon to explain. Having taken all this knowledge for granted for so long it was amazing to realize how complicated it was to explain. The earth has two kinds of rotation: around the sun, and once every day around its axis, which is why we have day and night. For this my hand was the earth, my thumb Senegal to indicate day (facing the sun) and night (facing away.) Lovely! Oh my gosh, I was having such fun, and they were so into it!! They asked about the stars, I explained they were all like the sun, some bigger, some smaller. So, why are some brighter than others they asked? Well, ‘cause they’re all much much further away than the sun, but some are closer and bigger than others. And SOME, I continued, are NOT like the sun, and are much closer than other stars, and these are other planets. Try explaining that in a language you aren’t yet fluent in… But I think they got the jist. They even started their own conversation about it, like, oh, I think there’s one you can see just after the morning prayer call (5 am) in the eastern sky.  So, they must have heard something like this before, or just be making somewhat educated guesses? I dunno, I’m never up that early, and frankly can rarely tell the difference myself.

Again, for whatever reason, Pape then asked me, what’s with the water than falls on the grass at night when it gets cold? So I got explain the different states of water! That when it’s hot, it has more energy and is lighter, and when it gets cold it loses that energy and gets heavier (waaaay oversimplification, I know, but my Wolof vocab does not include particle bonding and such.) I used boiling water as an example, that it bubble because of that extra energy, and wonder of wonders, another of the young men (my sun-hand-helper) took over and added his own so awesome bit: you know when you boil water and it rises up and then when it cools it gathers on the lid and falls back down. YES! That. Exactly that.

Next question? Y’all ready for this? Why doesn’t the sky all just fall down on us? WAAAAHH!! Gravity. My cell phone took a beating on this one as I explained that smaller, less heavy things are drawn to bigger, heavier ones. That’s why my phone falls to the earth, and why the earth circles the sun and the moon circles us. Even our air, here on earth, is full of stuff like oxygen and nitrogen (didn’t get into the atmosphere that keeps it here…), but way out there, all that black and dark blue space out there, has NOTHING. It’s completely empty. So there’s nothing to fall. Gravity and mass. Oh man, we should do a basic astrophysics course here! They’re so into it!!

Okay, so, obviously, it was really really fun to explain all this stuff, to challenge my Wolof, challenge my own ability to teach about things I take for granted as known. However, the greatest joy of this experience was their interest! They listened so intently to everything I said, helped explain it to each other, asked each other questions related to what I had said to further understand and relate it to their everyday experience. Oh man, oh man, it was frickin’ delicious.

So, why do I think these are some of the best contributions I can make in my time here? Because I’m realizing something about this work. And it’s something that I think get’s a lot of volunteers down, because it’s somewhat disillusioning. Here it is (it’s kind-of a duh): I am not going to stop the Sahara from spreading or this land from drying up. I am not going to be able to mitigate the interaction of modernization in the cities and traditional country life. I can’t solve their water problems. There are a lot of things I cannot do. BUT maybe I can broaden their horizons a little. Inspire a little awe for the environment here and the world at large that will encourage a greater persistence in pursuing education. Because, frankly, the world is changing, and it seems that the people who are able to interact with the forces that shape that change are educated. And in my opinion the most important change that could be made in the whole development scheme would be for the people affected by “development” to have some say in what it looks like.

PS, because I’ve talked so much about it over the last few months, it’s 8:40 AM, I’m wearing a sweater and wrap skirt over my pajamas and am still comfortably cool. I woke up cold in the night, wrapped tightly in my sheet and curled in the fetal position. This, my friends, happened without a fan. Lovely things are happening to the climate here J