Intercultural Dimensions
Crossing Cultures Senegal, West Africa Program
Intercultural Dimensions ©2009, info@interculturaldimensions.org, telephone: 617-864-8442
Field Study & Volunteering
Volunteer and field study components can be arranged for participants who would like to stay on in the country after the Crossing Cultures Senegal program ends in order to study or work with one of the groups visited. This could be in areas such as dance, folklore, women's issues, theater, contemporary medicine, traditional medicine, family planning, public health, legal aid, literacy, small business development, cooperatives, construction, computer technology, language, etc.
Examples of ID Participants' Volunteer and Field Study Activities
* One participant extended for five months to do a field study in the Mandinka language and traditional dance, performing a dance solo for an audience of about five hundred. She lived with a Senegalese family, studying Mandinka language, culture and dance in a one-on-one setting with a literacy organization. Her university accepted her work as a semester abroad; and she wrote her senior thesis on the causative verb in Mandinka, returning for six weeks the following year to add to her research.
* One stayed on for two months to study French with a private tutor.
* One extended to study Senegalese dance and to built a balafon, one of the instruments of Senegal, under the tutelage of a master musician.
* One extended to learn the Sabar, a traditional drum indigenous to Senegal.
* Two returned to attend university in Dakar.
* One stayed to research her Master's thesis in journalism.
* A high school teacher developed a program at her school to support a school library in Senegal with books and computer materials.
* Two participants taught computer skills in a middle school.