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Fulbright Program: U.S. Applicant Podcast

Transcript For: Africa and Middle East Webinar, June, 2009, Part 2

Africa and Middle East Webinar, June, 2009, Part 2. - Michael Stanton recounts his experience as a Fulbrighter in Senegal, 2005-06.

Africa and the Middle East Webinar, Part II

Tony:                Michael, you’re on now.

Michael:           OK, great. Let me get my screen up here.

Tony:                Perfect.

Michael:           OK. So, I’m going to… Great job, Maggie. I’m going to pretty much go through a lot of the same points that she did. I had a slightly different experience than she did, obviously, based on the country. So, my name is Mike Stanton. And, also, I had a different experience since I applied for the Fulbright almost 5 years after I had graduated. So I was an at large candidate. Well, this is a picture of me sort of getting my hair done, getting dreadlocks. I sort of wanted to go through the pictures, express my whole Fulbright project, but in short, I had proposed to initially work with traditional medicine, try to look at how traditional medicine and psychology work together in Senegal, but once I got there, I realized that sort of scientifically, and I had been doing a little research, that it didn’t make sense to measure traditional medicine was really difficult because it’s such an um... Each person has a very unique way of doing traditional medicine, and prescribing it, receiving it and oftentimes they use lots of different medications simultaneously, including western medications. So I decided to eventually change my topic to more coping and stress and right now I am doing a PhD at Duke on coping, essentially. So it really was great to go through that process and try to figure out what I wanted to do.

                        So here’s… this is sort of an idea of what Senegal looks like. You have cars and traffic but you also have horse drawn carts and such. It’s a real mixture of poor but also sort of upper class French Western influence.

                        This is my advisor, actually. I had made a connection also with-

Tony:                Michael-

Michael:           -much like Maggie, I had done an S.I.T. program in Senegal when I was a junior, so I actually made a connection, my institutional connection, through my S.I.T. advisor, and he advised me to work with this, Dr. xxx. Yes?

Tony:                Michael, sorry. Can you minimize your little “go to meeting” thing because we see the two people, but I don’t see your advisor. I don’t know, I sort of see this whole—Maggie, do you have the same problem?

Maggie:            Yes, I do. I see a little black spot over the person who I think is the advisor.

Tony:                Yeah, exactly.

Michael:           Do you see anything? Is it better now?

Maggie:            Slightly.

Tony:                Can you minimize the whole “go to meeting” thing? Do you still have…

Michael:           Go to meeting thing… do do do. Minimize it. Yeah, oh! I see what you’re saying.

Maggie:            Yeah, I think that’s almost better.

Michael:           Reduce the window, like this?

Tony:                Yeah.

Michael:           Is that better?

Tony:                Yeah, exactly. If you reduce the window we’ll see more. And move it to the left side of your screen. Top left.

Maggie:            Yeah, there you go, keep moving it left.

Tony:                Yeah. Now we see the hat.

Maggie:            Nice! That’s important.

Michael:           Do you see the whole picture now? There are-

Tony:                Now we do.

Michael:           -5 people in the picture. OK. Great, so… let’s go back here to.

                        Anyway, so this is my advisor and her family. She’s a medical doctor, a researcher, she also works with NGOs. She’s kind of a renaissance woman. So it was wonderful to work with her. Like I said, I made the connection through S.I.T. I actually traveled with my girlfriend, too, for much of the trip. And so, just to keep going, with Dr. Bayang, we built a cyber café at the university because a big problem in Senegal is that they’re teaching doctors, but they don’t have the kind of education that we do in the west, so through the internet it gave them a really great opportunity to really improve their education. For example, they don’t have textbooks like we do, they don’t have really great instruction so the idea for this cyber café was to really improve their education there. So, anyway, like I said, we… just like this project, sort of worked on coping research in Senegal in one area, but really, my experience was defined by not only that specific research project, but also some of the service projects I did as well as just other ways I got to know the people. I’m sure Maggie would attest to this, like you mentioned the tea ceremony. So anyway this is the cybercafé.

                        This is kind of an idea of what Dakar looks like. It’s on the water. It’s a city, but it’s all on the coast. It’s really pretty beautiful. I’m just going to keep flipping through here. Like I mentioned you have, you know, boubous, which are the long flowing shirts, gowns, but also you have western clothing. Here’s another, family we got very friendly with. And, I guess, my research took me in all kinds of different directions. So, I realized that I was really interested in class in Senegal, for example. So I became very close with a very lower class musician family, and this is one of the children from that family. And it was just interesting because even though they had very little money, they dealt very well with stress and conflict in their lives and it was very informative to live with them. As you can see it became pretty exciting. And actually I had met him in my S.I.T. program before. So, just to give you an idea, there’s all kinds of art. This is pretty interesting- this guy uses garbage to create artifacts.

                        Another thing I did, I got involved with the Embassy’s program. They have a summer camp for Senegalese students where they do a whole week in English and it’s all kinds of different projects, Peace Corps and Fulbrighters kind of taught their own class. I taught one on I think, hip hop. The kids really got into it, the high school students, and it was really great way to get involved in the community.

                        This is an island in Senegal, called Gore. It’s pretty famous for where a lot of the slaves were supposedly left to go to the United States.

                        The cuisine is pretty amazing. This is the national dish, in Senegal there’s a national dish, Tiébou Dienn, and that is fish and rice. I became very interested in the language, especially as a way to get into the research. In fact I translated my- I found these questionnaires online though the W.H.O., World Health Organization, and they were in English but I ended up translating them… I became,  I became, you know, pretty good in Wolof, I could pretty much converse, talk well in Wolof, but then I also translated it into some other languages in the villages that you’ll see in some of the later pictures.

                        So this is the only problem with… hold on one second. Can you see that or is it all messed up again.

Maggie:            Looks good. There’s a little mess up on the side but still cool.

Michael:           K. Anyway, so, dancing’s really important and there’s a lot of different ways that people spend their leisure time, even though, like I mentioned, many of them are poor in Senegal.

                        This is again another, through the Embassy, another program we did. Every month we would kind of pick a holiday, like black history month, or Martin Luther King day and we would sort of teach them about it, these high school students. They really enjoyed that and there was a food element to that as well. Can you see this photo everyone? Tony, can you see?

Tony:                Yeah, yeah, we can see it.

Michael:           So, in this project, like I mentioned, my advisor was involved in outreach into neighborhoods, I mean, into poor, rural regions in Senegal. So this is a program where we took doctors and dentists into villages where they had really almost never met a dentist or a doctor and we gave them free medication. It was a really great program.

                        And this is to give you an idea of what eating around the dish looks like. Very communal society. And, I think we did a lot of, it was pretty amazing, the treatments they could give these people.

                        Religion is really important in Senegal. I became, again as ways of coping with stress and hardship and avoiding psychological distress like depression, schizophrenia, a lot of people turn to religion. And I wanted to explore that, so this is a pilgrimage actually to their holy land. This is also part of that trip. This is the holiest place in all of Senegal and it was pretty amazing.

                        Again, in the village, so I did my research both in city and the village. I was trying to compare sort of, like I mentioned, these different questionnaires. I translated them into Mondang and uh… which is another language… and French so that I could really interview a lot of different kinds of people.

                        Can you see the warthog?

Tony/Maggie:   Yup.

Michael:           It was a pretty… very, very different than the city. The city is really, you know, there are big buildings and lots of people. In the village you see things like, there are monkeys here. I was on my bike, riding by and there were these monkeys on the side of the road. So it’s pretty, it’s definitely a very different cultural experience. And I think you’ll see that in a lot of these countries.

Tony:                And how did you split up your time, Michael, between the… how much of your Fulbright- you were there for 9 months or 10 months?

Michael:           I was there for 12 months.

Tony:                Twelve months, ok. And so how much time did you spend in the city compared to the country?

Michael:           I pretty much did about 2 months in the village. It was, you know, it was an experience. It was definitely very challenging but also some of the most warm, wonderful people. And just great experience. And so I did about 2 months in the village I want to say and then the rest in the city. Because in the city, even though it’s not in the village, you can really get a great variety of interviews with very poor and very rich people. So that’s sort of what I tried to do.

                        Senegal has really impressive bird communities, especially in Saint-Louis.

                        There were also other Americans there through Fulbright and not through Fulbright, Peace Corps and other programs. It’s a pretty interesting community. This is actually tea on the tray there. The tea ceremony that she was talking about.

                        This I believe is near the end. Parties are very important, like I mentioned, dancing and music as ways of dealing with stress and all kinds of… a way of bringing communities together. So this was just before we left we kind of threw a party for our friends cause they had thrown so many for us. And now back to the beginning.

                        So, just as a whole, I had an amazing experience. I think my word of advice would be, it’s very important obviously to have a plan when you go there, but like Maggie mentioned, plans change. Working with your project in the host country might be very different than how you has imagined it. So, be prepared for that change. And also, more important, is that the Fulbright experience is not just that one research project. I was fortunate enough, and I really appreciate my experience learning Wolof, French… I really felt fluent in French, very good in Wolof by the end but that took a lot of work going into villages where I might have felt initially uncomfortable and really challenging myself. And also, going and doing these projects in poor communities and villages and trying to get involved- actually I didn’t show pictures where we also got involved with a homeless shelter for young kids who ran away from these sort of religious leaders. I’d have to explain it longer, but it’s basically a homeless shelter for kids and I really… these kinds of experiences were really rewarding for me and these are the experiences I really took back with me as extremely personally rewarding.

Tony:                Did you originally have that in your proposal, Michael, or is that something that just came along when you were there?

Michael:           Yeah, it sort of came along, especially cause once I realized I was dealing with coping, and then once I started looking at the differences and the way that people coped depending on class, it really changed, I guess my focus. But I guess I was still interested in that sort of non-traditional, non-western Senegalese society especially cause I was interested in traditional medicine from the beginning, so I had a hint of it but the project really morphed as I worked through it.

Tony:                Great. Thank you very much Michael.

Michael:           Yeah, sure.