Over the past two weeks, I have attended three extremely different conferences as part of my internship at l’Association des juristes sénégalaises (AJS). Each experience has been vastly unique from one another and taught me something new about the policymaking and advocacy processes in Senegal.
The first conference I attended was held at one of the fancy business hotels in Senegal, the Hotel de Noom. This conference was about integrating the Maputo Protocol into Senegal’s national law in order to make it legal for a medical abortion—abortion in the case of rape, incest, danger to the life of the mother, or malformation of the fetus. As I walked up to the hotel, I was very grateful I had opted for my shiny black shoes I had worn in professional settings back in the U.S. Everyone else was wearing suits and ties and dresses and heels, and although my clothes were definitely not the same formal caliber, my shoes made me feel not completely out of place.
I asked a member of the hotel staff where to find the conference I was attending, found the room, opened the door, and saw many of the AJS women I had been working with at the administrative office over the past few days. They welcomed me with smiles and told me to sit. People came in at a leisurely pace and began chatting with one another as I was instructed to take attendance and helped set up the posters of the participating organizations.
And then we waited. And waited. The conference was supposed to start at 9:00am, but we did not get started until 10:40am. When the conference finally began, everyone presented themselves and then someone handed the microphone to me. For this conference, I had been instructed to help take notes to write the “rapport” (the summarizing report of the conference proceedings), so I wasn’t expecting to do much more than observe. However, I really appreciated them allowing me to participate! After I presented myself, the President of AJS explained that AJS takes on interns in order to expand their perspectives and help them learn new skills. I was so excited to see how the conference would go and how solutions would arise!
The first activity roughly translates to an “acknowledgement of values.” The facilitator guided the participants through the story of a girl named Mia, who was a victim of rape and died by suicide after she was unsuccessful in finding an abortion. The facilitator then asked the audience “What killed Mia?” Multiple men spoke up first and said it was the suicide, then a woman spoke up and said it was society. Afterwards, when the facilitator asked if Mia deserved to have a medical abortion in the case of rape, every single person said no because the law prohibited it.
I completely disagreed! This was a discussion about values and what is morally right, not what is written in the law. In my opinion, they had all gotten the meaning behind the question wrong.
Over the next two days, I listened to numerous presentations about the Maputo Protocol, how it has been used in court cases to further women’s rights, and how Benin and Rwanda integrated the Maputo Protocol into national law. There were also three workshops: one about problem identification, one about developing messages, and one about forming plans of action. The attendees were split into four groups: jurists, institutions, media, and socio-religious actors. I was invited to be the note-taker for the jurists group.
Lawyers have a reputation of being incredibly nitpicky about word choice, and this exercise was no exception. I was told probably ten different things to write down, and every time I confirmed what they had just said, they had something they wanted to argue about and change. Furthermore, I simply do not have the French vocabulary for all of the technical language they were saying. At one point when I didn’t know a word yet again and the lawyer telling me to write seemed a little frustrated, I just said (in French): “I’m sorry! I’m an Anglophone, I don’t know this technical vocabulary in French.” He replied, “Oh really? I didn’t know! Here’s how you spell it.” And he was far nicer afterwards.
When it came time to present our workshopping ideas, my group turned to me and told me to present in order to practice my French. I was a little nervous, of course, but honestly at this point I have been in so many uncomfortable situations in which I’ve had to speak French that it wasn’t bad at all. I just read what we had written and explained it a little, and that was all. I’m sure I made errors in my pronunciation and grammatical mistakes, but I don’t think I care all that much. I want my language to continue improving, but I am very proud of the place I have gotten to and the confidence I have in myself speaking French, even with mistakes.
I learned a lot from the conference and how these proceedings work, but I’m not sure how much actually got done. Sure, people came together to sit in a room and talk about the problem, but it didn’t really seem like any true plans of action were made. People came to talk and eat delicious food and be in a space with other important people, but I wondered what tangible progress was coming from this conference. I later spoke with the President of AJS and she told me that this is just how AJS and the policy process work.
The second conference was only a day and was all about improving skills for communication with the media. In the morning, I listened to the presentations and people’s interjections, not really sure if I could participate. At one point, the facilitator was talking about social media and mentioned that everyone has TikTok! For reference, TikTok is immensely popular in Senegal. The number of times my host mom has been on TikTok at dinner or while hanging out with family is insane to me. I wanted to bring this up and talk about how my relationship with social media is far different and how social media has a far more negative stigma in the U.S., but I wasn’t sure if my interjection would be appreciated or not.
While at lunch, I discovered I should have absolutely spoken up. Numerous people told me I could and should participate, so in the afternoon I did! In a conversation about the importance of presentation style and aesthetics, I spoke about how important that is for credibility in the U.S. If you have good content in the U.S. but it’s presented poorly, more often than not, you are not taken seriously. I was really proud of contributing even a small point such as that one, and decided to try to add more of my perspectives to conversations later on.
The next day, I attended the third conference and it was completely different. In a suburb of Dakar called Bambilor, this conference was intended to raise awareness amongst women and their communities about the 2020 law that criminalized rape in Senegal. That’s right, rape has only been criminalized in Senegal for five years. And even with the current law, most instances of rape go unpunished.
This conference was entirely in Wolof, so when it was time to present myself, I knew what language I had to do it in. Very nervously, I said in Wolof, “Salaam maalekum! Mangi tudd Cati. Ndongo américaine laa ak stagiare à l’AJS. Jërëjëf!” Meaning: “Hello! My name is Cati (my nickname in Senegal that is far easier to pronounce than Caitlin). I am an American student and an intern at AJS. Thank you!”
Oddly, I understood far more of the conference than I was anticipating. Although I was usually able to glean the general topic of conversation based on the few Wolof words I know and a few words they used in French, I was typically lost for more than that. However, my saving grace was that all of the slides were in French. I asked my supervisor why at the end of the conference.
“No one here is alphabetised in Wolof,” she replied. I suddenly realized just how fundamentally flawed the current system was; in a Wolof oral culture, the laws were written in French. Even if the 2020 law had been translated into Wolof or Serer or Pulaar or another native language, the vast majority of the population could not read it. What was the solution, then? Talking. This conference was the sole method for women and their community to learn their legal rights.
Discovering this made me realize this conference was about so much more than “just” talking. Even though some of the solutions seemed so obvious—calling the legal clinic, going to the police, going to the legal clinic in person if it was possible—many of the conference participants were just learning about these resources now. This conference suddenly seemed far more important than the conference the week prior in the swanky Noom hotel.
I really enjoyed these experiences at the conferences but I hope to go visit the legal clinics soon. I am very excited to learn about how AJS conducts its on-the-ground work and hopefully be helpful in facilitating the process.
Ba ci kanam / À bientôt / See you soon,
Caitlin
