Littering, Planting, and Harvesting: Imagining Going Green in the Sands of Senegal

Abstract

My name is Fernie Diop. I am 16 years old and I am now a sophomore in high school. When I was doing this sustainable development project, I was in the sixth and seventh grades. It was my first year at the Intercultural Middle School (IMS) when I started the project. I was an American living in Senegal. I dance, play the violin, and I am trying to play the kora. I care about the environment and have been doing work on the environment since I was in the fifth grade in America when I did a science fair project on the water quality of the lakes in Baton Rouge. I speak French and English. I am part Mauritanian and part Haitian and I have three sisters (I am the eldest). I have been in Senegal for four years. It’s been cool to compare the differences between first world and third world countries. I have had to learn how to live differently and be more aware of how we use our resources. I have to be aware of electrical outages and water shortages and to not overuse water. It makes one more conscious of how scarce things are and how we have to take care of what we have on this planet. When I was doing the sustainable development project, I was in the sixth grade and my mother, Dominique Duval-Diop, was my English and geography teacher. It was so weird because I kept calling her “mom” in class and she insisted that I call her Madame Duval. My classmates kept thinking that I knew things ahead of time. They kept asking me what’s going to be on the next test and so on. I kept telling them that I didn’t know. My mom treated me like every other student. The fact is that she was one of the program coordinators didn’t really cause any problems with my friends in the sustainability development club, but this fact did cause problems with other people. Some of the other students who weren’t involved, and even some of the teachers, thought that my mom was playing favorites by letting me participate in the project because she was my mother. Also, Yvette’s husband was my math tutor and my family and their family were really close, so that gave them more reason to think that there was favoritism going on. I think that made things even more difficult for me as I tried to do project activities in the school.