However Long the Night

by Aimee Molloy

  Before long, she began to notice that when offered a more engaging, interactive, and relevant way of learning, the women of the village—the same women who once argued they could never become educated, could never be learners—quickly grasped the lessons they studied. She also noticed how excited they were to come to class and how eager they were to share their new knowledge with others.

  Deborah Fredo, Molly’s good friend and an educational activist, spent hours interviewing the women of Saam Njaay for her doctorate on nonformal education. “I look forward to attending class each day,” a woman named Ndag Ndiaye told Deborah. “When I enter the room, I take off my boubou of discretion, feeling free for the first time to speak my mind and say what I think. Maybe one day, when I leave class, I won’t have to put it back on again.”

  Molly especially cherished this type of growing confidence she observed among many of the women and, with that confidence, a new desire to change certain village conditions. Within six months, the Saam Njaay villagers successfully advocated to be included on a list of villages to receive safe drinking water. The men participated in digging the trenches to lay the pipes that would bring the water to a communal faucet in the village square. The day the water finally arrived was one of the happiest celebrations in the history of Saam Njaay. To mark the occasion, the women organized a baptism for the fountain. Everyone got dressed in their very best clothes. A large lunch of fish and rice was served, and people danced and ate until late into the night.

  The water, it turned out, was just the beginning. Over the next few months, Molly’s students built a classroom out of millet stalks and installed gas lamps so that classes could meet after sundown, when chores were finished and work in the fields was completed. They went on to organize the planting of a wood lot to provide wood for cooking, keeping them from having to walk several kilometers a day in search of wood for fuel. They built more than fifty clay-and-sand wood-burning stoves, which conserve heat and lessen the need for wood. In 1983, they established a health table, and then submitted, in Wolof, a project for a community health center, which was approved. One villager ran the center, keeping daily records of every patient who arrived from the twenty-seven surrounding villages, meticulously recording the twenty-five cents paid by each patient for receiving basic treatments for malaria, conjunctivitis, wounds, diarrhea, or fatiguement (general fatigue).

  But Molly’s work in the village was not without its mistakes. After learning that the villagers had long craved a garden to improve nutrition, help sustain them between weekly trips to the market in Thiès, and earn them income from the sale of the vegetables, Molly worked with them to write a project to fund a well and purchase start-up equipment, seeds, and fertilizer. Despite her best intentions to leave all decisions to the villagers, Molly and Bolle announced that the garden would be cared for communally. After all, they thought, this is Africa; shouldn’t things be done collectively here? When everything was finally completed—the well dug, the land plowed, and the seeds planted—forty people showed up to begin watering and caring for the plants. The next day, thirty came. Within a week, only ten people were coming, until eventually only Molly and Bolle were working in the garden. Molly called a meeting, feeling more than a little perturbed. “What is wrong? Why have you stopped working on your garden?”

  The villagers were silent, until a man named Magueye Ndiaye spoke. “Well, it’s your garden.”

  “What do you mean?” Molly asked.

  “The way the garden is organized is not the way we do things here,” Magueye responded.

  “How do you do things?”

  “Well, we would have assigned rows in the garden for each participating family who would plant the seeds and continue to look after the plants.”

  “I don’t understand,” Molly said, feeling surprised and a little embarrassed. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  “Because you never asked,” he said.

  Molly was speechless.

  “And you were so excited, and none of us wanted to discourage you,” he added.

  After the meeting, Molly went to the village chief. “Did you know that I was making this mistake?” she asked him.

  “Of course I knew it,” he replied.

  “Why did you allow me to do that? Why didn’t you tell me what I was doing wrong and direct me?”

  “A good leader must make her mistakes,” Alaaji said. “If I had told you, you wouldn’t have fully understood the lesson. You needed to find your way to this answer on your own.”

  The garden was quickly reorganized. Each family was given a small plot of the garden and agreed to contribute a thousand francs (two dollars) for fertilizer and general maintenance. To this day, thirty years later, the garden of Saam Njaay still thrives.

  A YEAR AFTER SHE arrived in Saam Njaay, Molly received a two-year grant from USAID to continue and expand her educational work in the village. The grant included an annual salary for Molly of about $30,000. She was thirty-three years old, and it was the most money she’d ever earned. But receiving so much payment for her work made her highly uncomfortable, especially when those around her had so little, and she often gave her money away to those who needed it more. (Like her work ethic, this too became a behavior Molly would never shed. After she turned sixty, her board of directors insisted she finally establish a retirement fund.) She was, however, careful to set aside a certain amount each month to send home to her mother, who promptly deposited it in a savings account in Molly’s name. While Molly didn’t see the need for a savings account, she hoped this gesture might diminish Ann’s relentless pestering about her future security. Molly knew that in the largely white, conservative Arizona town where Ann now lived, Ann struggled to explain to people what her youngest daughter did for a living and why she insisted on remaining in Africa for so little money when she could just come back to the United States, get a good job, buy a house and a car, and secure health insurance for herself. Molly knew that Ann would never understand this, but what she was doing—living in a small African village, developing an education program—did not feel like a choice. It was just what she did, what she had always been meant to do. “I knew that I could never do any other type of work,” Molly says, “and I also knew that my mother loved me. But it was conditional love, tied to this idea of who she wanted me to be. For so long all I wanted was her approval, the one thing I couldn’t get.”

  But having her mother’s approval had begun to matter less. Molly had come to realize that trying to make Ann understand her choices was a little like trying to water the desert with a garden hose. And anyway, the people of Saam Njaay certainly understood. They knew this woman was special. As Molly’s friend Carrie Dailey recalls, “Every time I visited Molly in her village, I developed an even greater respect for her. I’d lived in Senegal for more than thirty years and had adapted well, but never like Molly did. She lived like the people of the village. She ate what they ate. She showered outside, behind a makeshift screen made of cornstalks. But the most amazing thing to watch was how she interacted with the women and children. She was not even aware of the difficulties there. All she saw were the people, whom she truly loved.”

  The villagers felt the same way. Molly was one of them. She took part in every birth, wedding, and funeral. When the evenings turned cooler, women and children would come to Molly’s hut and coax her outside, where they would show her new dance moves, which she’d later showcase at the nightly village gatherings. They loaned her a horse, on which she’d travel bareback down the long, dusty paths, visiting the farmers in the fields, investigating what was happening in nearby villages. As Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay told her often, she was the salt in their rice. Without her work in the village, life would be flat and tasteless. To them, she was a woman who had everything.

  Well, everything except the one thing a true Senegalese woman needed: a husband.

  11

  Jabar ak Ndey (Wife and Mother)

  Molly met Walter Williams the following year, i
n August 1984. Born and raised in Mississippi, he’d recently taken a job with an American-based NGO that had a project in a village very close to Saam Njaay. A former Peace Corps volunteer himself, he’d arrived in Senegal after years spent working in some of the most difficult communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then called Zaire.

  Molly was amazed to discover that an American was working nearby and that he also happened to be recently divorced, three years older than she, and very good looking. She was thirty-four at the time. Although she’d dated during the ten years she’d been living in Africa—a few Senegalese she’d gotten to know through work or friends, an American working in Kenya whom she’d met on a plane—she had partly given up on the idea that she would marry. It was unlikely she could ever adeptly fill the role of a Senegalese wife and all that was expected of a woman in that position—cooking, making the arrangements for every religious and other holiday, and holding an entire extended family together. The last thing she thought might happen after moving to a remote village miles away from any modern amenities in western Senegal was that she’d meet a handsome, alluring, and very eligible American bachelor.

  Molly and Walter fell in love quickly. She was taken by his charm, intelligence, and sincere dedication to his work. Most mornings he would be out of his hut by four o’clock, walking from village to village to rouse people, to get them working on whatever project was on the agenda. He visited Molly most evenings, and they’d sit in her hut or in front of a bonfire and talk about their lives. After high school, Walter had been drafted to fight in Vietnam. Not unlike her father and his experience fighting in World War ii, Walter was reluctant to talk about the realities of his time in Vietnam, but he could never fully mask the pain of it.

  A few months after they met, Walter showed Molly the amulet he’d been given by a marabout. “I asked him for something to shield us from anything bad happening,” Walter said, “so that we’ll always be together.”

  They married in March, seven months after meeting, in a simple civil ceremony in Dakar. Molly wore a long white boubou, and Carrie Dailey was her witness. When Molly called Ann a few weeks earlier to tell her the news that she was getting married, Ann was surprised but supportive. Like Victor, Walter was also African-American, but by this time Ann had grown more comfortable with Molly’s choices, recognizing that she could not keep Molly from doing what she wanted. A few weeks after the wedding, Molly and Walter settled into a new home in Dakar: an airy three-bedroom apartment in a comfortable neighborhood called Fenêtre Mermoz. It was a very happy time. The couple would both continue their work and return often to their respective villages, but Molly was happy to return to life in Dakar. She especially loved being married, feeling a thrill each time she returned home to find Walter’s African caftans hanging in their large closet beside her collection of boubous. Their new apartment was more spacious than anywhere Molly had lived in Africa; she’d grown so accustomed to living in the simplest quarters, she didn’t know what to do with it all. But it wasn’t long before they filled the space with the one thing that Molly had, throughout her life, wanted perhaps more than anything else: a daughter, Anna Zoé Williams.

  IN 1987, WHEN ANNA ZOÉ—or Zoé as everyone came to call her—turned two years old, Molly took a part-time consultancy position with USAID to evaluate a literacy program being implemented in 242 centers throughout Senegal. What she learned surprised and disheartened her. Sitting in dozens of classes, she discovered that few villagers remained enrolled for long, and the ones who continued to attend were frequently bored, finding it hard to keep their eyes open during the long lectures. If the students spoke during class, it was only to recite letters and syllables at the request of the teachers. Although the teachers had been told to be “participatory” in their classrooms, they hadn’t received training on how to do this. They drew, therefore, from the only model of teaching and learning they knew: an authoritarian one.

  As Molly had learned from her teaching experience in the village, isolated word fragments, without context or meaning, would fall from students’ memories like coins from a pocket. The teachers were frustrated, the students felt lost, and Molly began to understand just why the national literacy rates were so abysmal.

  Her observations reinforced her growing belief that literacy teachers needed a different kind of training and that literacy programs needed to be more holistic: educational, fun, engaging, and most of all, emerging from people’s experiences in their daily lives.

  At about this time, Molly was asked by another NGO, through funding from USAID, to help develop a literacy program in the Kaolack region. A three-hour drive from Dakar, Kaolack is known as the peanut basin of the country. The communities here were similar to those in which Molly had been working, but they felt hotter, dustier, and even poorer and more desolate. She went to work immediately, eager to draw from her past experiences to create a new educational model. She took the materials, especially the learning games, posters, and stories she had developed in collaboration with the villagers in Saam Njaay, and began to organize them. She found that they could be broken into modules, such as problem solving, hygiene, and health. She integrated literacy and numeracy into the modules and started the program with important questions: What do we want for our community? Why come to class? Why learn to read and do math? in creative bursts, she wrote what would be the first modules of her new approach to literacy.

  By the following year, the program Molly was implementing in Kaolack began to bear fruit. Engaged students were flocking to class, hungry for more. Responding to their enthusiasm, she created more activities—games, drawings, plays, poems, and stories. But then she received devastating news: there was no money to fund the second year of the program. Her work could not continue. “I was horribly frustrated and depressed,” she says. “I knew I had created something that people wanted and that worked. When the program collapsed, it felt like someone had stolen something I held very precious.”

  Adding to this blow, Molly and Walter were starting to have problems in their marriage. Walter had been assigned to work in Guinea-Bissau, a fifteen-hour drive from Dakar. While Molly longed to be closer to her husband, she did not want to leave Senegal, or the chance to somehow keep the Kaolack program alive, in order to join him. She was dealing with being a new mother, sensing a physical and increasingly emotional distance with her husband, and also feeling that she had failed. To this day she remembers it as “one of the darkest times of my life.”

  A CHANCE ENCOUNTER IN 1998 with the new UNICEF country representative in Dakar, Denis Caillaux, helped to turn that around. Upon their meeting, Denis explained to Molly that he was interested not only in development to improve the lives of the millions of children in Africa but also in “preparation” for village development, a concept Molly found intriguing. When Molly told him of her work, and her discouragement at being cut off midstream from her successful program in Kaolack, he invited her to meet him at his Dakar office.

  “I’m interested in what we have to do prior to bringing in projects to villages … laying the foundation, if you like,” Denis told Molly, within the first few minutes of their meeting, “because I have seen so many projects start up and then fail.”

  “Yes!” Molly responded, knowing she had found a kindred spirit. “People first need basic education in their own language, drawing from their own cultural experiences. Only then can they effectively manage projects. This is especially true for the women I have been interacting with in the villages.”

  “I’d like to see your ideas for education in action,” he said.

  Molly took him to Saam Njaay to speak to the villagers about all they had learned and to see the health center and millet machine they had successfully managed on their own. It didn’t take long after this visit for him to approve the proposal Molly submitted to UNICEF to continue her work. With the support of Ndioro Ndiaye, the minister for social development, they decided to pilot Molly’s education program in villages close to Thiès, wh
ere Molly and Zoé had recently moved into a four-bedroom house and where Walter had joined them. After much discussion about their future, Walter had resigned his post in Guinea-Bissau and returned to Senegal to create his own NGO, called Culture for African Development, through which Molly would receive the UNICEF funding for her project. The idea was that Walter and Molly would work together. She would continue to focus on the work she loved: developing dynamic, interactive materials for use in the village classroom and training teachers on how to use cultural traditions to create a truly participatory and engaging class environment. Walter would direct the organization, manage staff, take care of general administration, and be responsible for implementing the community projects: digging wells, starting gardens, doing reforestation and animal fattening.

  Molly hoped that Walter’s return to Senegal and the joint collaboration would help strengthen their marriage, but working together proved to be an even greater challenge. While Molly had received funding for her educational program, Walter had difficulty finding support for the high-cost capital projects he wanted to implement, causing him great frustration. Over the next year Molly and he grew further apart, and in August 1990, Walter decided to move back to Dakar. Molly soon found out that he was living with another woman. They divorced a few months later, five years after they’d married.

  12

  Lu Guddi gi Yàgg-Yàgg (However Long the Night)

  In early 1992 Molly received a call from a son of Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay.

  “Sukkéyna, our father has grown very ill,” he said. “He is requesting to see you. Can you come to Saam Njaay?”

  Molly drove immediately from her home in Thiès to the village, which she still visited on a regular basis. Along the way, she felt a cold panic rising inside of her at the thought of losing Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay. It had been more than fifteen years since her father, Al, died, and six years earlier, Cheikh Anta Diop had died unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of 62. Despite the fact that Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay was 104 years old, Molly didn’t feel prepared to lose him too. She had come to love him as a father and she looked to him for support and guidance, which she needed now more than ever. Two years earlier, after her marriage had dissolved and, along with it, her desire to continue working for Walter’s organization, Molly had decided to establish her own organization. The decision had not been an easy one. In spite of the success Molly had enjoyed to this point—running the Démb ak Tey children’s center for six years, building a highly successful educational program at the village level, working to develop literacy projects—she questioned her ability to run an NGO and was consumed with self-doubt that she could pull it off.