Type two fun
The summer before my freshman year of college, I went on an orientation trip with the other students in my scholarship program. It was basically a wilderness expedition for wimps—a little hiking, a little rafting, lots of sitting around talking about how hiking and rafting taught us about being the next leaders of the free world. Over all, it was silly and unnecessarily pedantic. But one thing that stuck with me from that trip was something one of our instructors told us about enjoying experiences.
He said that sometimes you’re experiencing something and it’s just straight up awesome. You’re incredibly glad to be there, you like what’s going on in the moment, and you don’t want it to end. This he called “type 1 fun” (and I call ‘studying abroad in Europe’). But there was also another kind of great experience in his mind. This was the type in which one hiked five miles uphill with a heavy backpack and wet sneakers to reach an incredible view of the Appalachian mountains, or crashed their raft into rocks and had to work for an hour to unmoor the damn thing before continuing down the river. These kind of experiences didn’t necessarily seem fun at the time they were happening. In fact, in some ways they felt gritty and tough and even a bit miserable. But when they were over, when you were on the other side of the rapids or looking out over the mountains, everything was easily worth it. What’s more, what you were experiencing was all the more powerful for having been difficult along the way. This, my instructor said, was “type 2 fun.”
If I could characterize my time in Senegal so far in one phrase, I think that would be it. The daily experience of being an outsider, of struggling with language, of learning to navigate the new physical and mental landscapes of life in a foreign place, is not always enjoyable. I spend a lot of time frustrated and homesick, wishing to once again be at ease and comfortable and close to the people I love. But the truth is, there is no way that spending four months in west Africa could not be a tremendous experience for me. And I am aware every day of just how much I value being here and will value the experience long after it ends.
Sorry if this entry is a bit like an inspirational daytime television segment. But sometimes corniness is the only way to explain something. That’s just how it goes :-)
Over and out.
P.S. random life updates from Dakarsville: I’m in the midst of a bunch of newspaper internship applications for next summer, I just finished an article for the Chronicle’s news magazine about language learning in West Africa (which I’ll link you to as soon as it’s published), my dad and step-mom are coming here to Senegal on Saturday (!!), and it’s finally cool enough here that I sleep under my sheet at night instead of on top of it. Incredible.
