AMHERST — When Amherst Regional High School sophomore Joe Hazlip visited West Africa last month as part of a unique exchange, he didn’t expect to find the same music there as in the U.S.
“My host friends and I would walk together at night in Senegal,” Hazlip said. “I remember I didn’t expect we’d be listening to the same music, you know, that we both really love. But there we were.”
Hazlip is a Sene-Gambian scholar, part of a one-of-a-kind cultural exchange between ARHS and schools in Senegal and The Gambia, where students spend three weeks, after which their host students stay with families in the Pioneer Valley.
“They listened to a lot of American artists,” Hazlip continued, referring to the hosts with whom he stayed. “But, like, they showed me a lot of new stuff, African artists, and I still listen to it.”
Music was a part of a celebration held Tuesday in the high school cafeteria, where Hazlip and 10 other scholars (including this reporter’s daughter), shared photographs, slides and findings with parents, teachers, staff, students and community members. Their presentations ranged from science to culture to art, including titles such as “Village Leadership,” “Gender Roles and Family Life” and “Climate Change in Senegambia.”
The program celebrates its fifth trip to the continent this year. Since 2013, more than 100 students from ARHS and schools in Senegal and The Gambia have participated in the exchange.
The long-term goal is to infuse African studies into all parts of the curriculum and to maintain a cycle of exchange programs with partner schools,” said Bruce Penniman, a program co-founder and adviser. As a result, ARHS offers curriculum content relating to the continent, Penniman said.
At the event last week, Penniman told the crowd that when the Senegalese students arrive in the region, “one of their favorite places to visit is the Holyoke Mall,” to which laughter erupted.
“It’s a very different kind of market than what they’re used to,” Penniman said.
Students from The Gambia and Senegal are welcomed to the Pioneer Valley every two years, where they are hosted by local families and visit town hall and meet government officials. They visit cultural/historical sites in Western Massachusetts, take a UMass tour, and travel to the State House in Boston and the Kennedy Library.
The program’s African partners include the Trust Agency for Rural Development, an organization in Gunjur, The Gambia, and the Gunjur Senior Secondary School. In Dakar, Senegal, the program partners with Cours Sainte Marie de Hann, a school with 5,000 students and winner of the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. It also visits Tostan, a renowned organization dedicated to community-led development and empowering education, founded by Molly Melching.
The scholars’ founding
The Sene-Gambian Scholars Program was the brainchild of two ARHS educators — Momodou Sarr, a native of The Gambia, and Oumy Cissé, a native of Senegal who was teaching French, according to Penniman.
“Oumy was actually moving from one apartment to another,” Penniman said, “and she needed someone with a truck to move her bed for her. So I have a pickup truck and volunteered.” Penniman had taught a literature course and began “many conversations about Senegalese literature” with Oumy and Momodou.
After the move, the three talked about “the pattern of traditional Eurocentric exchange programs.” ARHS had programs in Spain, France, Germany and Russia, he said.
“So, we thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an exchange program that included some other part of the world than just Europe?’” Penniman said.
The vision for the program had three parts. The first was an exchange experience, person-to-person, living with families, the second was to expand the exposure to African studies in the curriculum at the high school, and third “was to increase awareness about Africa in the community.”
“That’s because Americans’ knowledge about Africa is, well, let’s say, limited, to say the least,” Penniman said. “Limited and often quite distorted.”
The program began with a teacher trip to Africa in 2011. About a dozen students then went in 2013. The trip in 2015 was postponed after an Ebola outbreak, so the group went in 2016, then 2018. The 2020 trip was postponed until 2022, after the pandemic.
The Senegalese election delayed the group’s travel this year, with the usual peaceful government transition turning “violent at times,” Penniman said. “So, the head of the school that we partner with in Senegal had recommended that we postpone until after the election,” he said. “And of course, then the president decided to postpone the election.”
To prepare for the trip, ARHS students met after school and learned local languages, such as Mandingo, history, geography, politics and culture, and chose a topic to further investigate before and during their trip.
“It’s one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had in my entire life,” said Craig Hrones, a 10th grader at ARHS. “Everyone there was so welcoming, and I feel like I learned so much, and I got to see so many different places.”
Hrones said he saw an advertisement for the program at ARHS and attended meetings at the school for months to prepare.
“I was surprised at how similar everything was over there,” he said. “All the people I met there felt very much like people I could have just met here at our school. Their school was very similar to ours.”
He said he attended school with his hosts, and communication was easier than he expected. “You could just connect with them through little things, just like you could connect with someone here,” he said. “Like sports, like working with food, just like school.”
Sarr, one of the founding advisors, said Tuesday evening that he never tires of showing young Americans that there’s another world out there.
“They can dispel the myth of the ‘other’ by immersing themselves into different cultures and ways of knowing that will change their lives,” he said.
Sarr and Penniman are retiring from the program and ARHS Dean of Students Mary Custard is among the new advisors.
Students learn and grow and get to know people who are so different from them, but yet so much the same,” she said to the crowd. “They made some lifelong friends in another continent.” This year marks Custard’s third visit to Africa.
She said she enjoyed watching the students “gather together in the evenings and listening to music and dancing and telling jokes and laughing, even when it wasn’t funny.”
For their trip to Africa, ARHS students help defray the costs of the trip by holding fundraisers. The West African Takeout Day was formerly run through the ARHS culinary arts program. After its termination, South Church Amherst stepped up with a state-or-the-art kitchen. Last fall, they packaged and sold more than 200 meals of West African cuisine. There’s also sales of candy bars and African jewelry.
On the road in West Africa
For their first three nights, the scholars stayed at Gambia Pastoral Institute, in the country’s largest city, Serekunda. It’s a conference and retreat center with overnight accommodations. From there, they made several day trips, including a visit to the village of Jufureh, the birthplace of Kunta Kinte, Alex Haley’s fictionalized ancestor.
Alex Haley wrote the 1976 novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which was made into a record-breaking television series nearly half a century ago. The story concerned Kinte, the 18th-century African who was captured, sold into slavery in Africa and transported to North America. The book follows his life and the lives of his descendants down to Haley. Many of Haley’s relatives still reside in the village.
Scholars then visited the island to which Kunta Kinte and thousands of slaves were transported before they were put on ships to the Americas. Next, they visited the Kachikally Crocodile Pool and Museum.
In the village of Gunjur, a small coastal town in southwestern Gambia, students become guests of local families. One of the first activities is a walking tour to “pay our respects to all of the elders,” Penniman said. “It’s also visiting the chief and the imam and the alikaaloo (Mandingo for a word with meanings similar to “mayor” in English).”
After 20 days in The Gambia, the group visited Dakar, the capital of Senegal, population 3 million. Gunjur has a population of 17,000. In Senegal, students travel to Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island, or the House of Slaves and the Door of No Return, from where it is said that millions of slaves left the continent for the last time.
Students also went on safari in Senegal, observing protected water buffalo, red and green monkeys, giraffes, rhinos, ostriches, zebras and boars, according to Henry Rennard, ARHS senior, who gave a presentation on wildlife in Senegambia.
Aaron Buford leads the restorative justice program at ARHS and said the trip to Africa was his first time “off the continent.” He’s looking forward to future trips as an adviser. He said there was plenty for students and advisers to worry about before the trip.
“You realize that you were putting so much emphasis on these things that you thought would matter because they matter so much to you here,” Buford said. “But not so there. You really learn how to reframe your experiences.”
Lucia Dingo-Early, an ARHS 10th grader, said she admired the African “way of being.” “People here keep to themselves,” she said. “It’s just very different there. Everyone is so nice and open, and everybody welcomes you.”
At the end of the evening, Penniman invoked the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who Penniman said had suggested that someday an African Peace Corps might be formed.
“This corps would send ambassadors out to Western countries to teach them about community,” Penniman said. “I think we’ve seen it here tonight.”
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