Pretty much the first thing any TGC fellow does once he/she get his/her field experience destination is, hopefully/probably, begin learning about the country and culture wherein they will be immersing themselves. For me, that's Senegal!
The very, very first thing I did was buy a travel guide. Usually, I go almost exclusively with LonelyPlanet, but the only guides I could find for Senegal also included the Gambia and were a few years of out date. Luckily, I found a brand called Bradt, which I had heretofore never heard of, but it turns out is very similar to LonelyPlanet and nearly as good.
While I had not daydreamed about Senegal, per se, being my field experience location, a preliminary flip through the pages of the Bradt guide immediately piqued my interest. The country has a familiar feel to Morocco, where I traveled in 2009--with its predominately Muslim culture, French postcolonial flare, and desert-dominated geography, at least in the northern part of the country--combined with the exact perfect amount of the unfamiliar: perogues, exotic wildlife, tribal culture/dialects, etc. Senegal is, in sooth, like nowhere I have ever been and nowhere I would ever choose to go on my own, which is what makes it a perfect TGC destination.
Although we don't yet know which particular region of Senegal we will be sent to--as a reminder, all ten fellows will bookend their trip in Dakar, and then we'll be sent out in pairs to a more rural outpost, but we won't find out until closer to our departure date where and with whom that will be--it of course behooves us fellows to research the country & culture in advance, rather than rely upon what the folks at IREX plan to tell us.
After skimming the Bradt guide, I wondered if Senegal is a place that Anthony Bourdain has been. Surely in the decade or so he's made a living at traveling the world, experiencing cultures through their food, and televising it all for society's viewing pleasure, he's made it to Senegal. Indeed he has. As a long-time Bourdain fan, this thrilled me, and sure enough there's an episode from Season 7 of Parts Unknown set in none other than Senegal, namely the capital Dakar and Senegal's second largest city Saint-Louis.
Despite my prior perusal of the Bradt guide, my imagination of Senegal was hardly accurate (far too romanticized!), and I'm so thankful I watched this episode. Among its highlights were Bourdain's meeting with various citizen diplomats and journalists (including NPR's own Ofeibea Quist-Arcton), his beachfront meal with a local chef who has worked/traveled abroad but returned to Senegal to elevate its cuisine while maintaining local integrity, his elucidations and examples of Senegalese hospitality called taranga, his concerting of both traditional and rap musicians, and of course the food: freshly harvested sea urchin, grilled meats of all sorts, stewed beef with spicy peanut sauce, yassa and grouper over open fire, fresh baguette with bean spread for breakfast, and of course many-a-communal dish. Never deny when offered. It's fascinating how similar much of the food was to southern "soul" food, and Bourdain touches on this in the episode, although the reason for this is sadly the now, thankfully, defunct slave trade. An embedment of the episode is below, and Bourdain's field notes on the country as well as other resources can be found at https://explorepartsunknown.com/destination/senegal/.
Of course, I want to be careful not to research too much. As an anal-retentive planner to the extreme, I have found that planning too much leads to expecting too much, and when expectations aren't met, disappointment promptly ensues. Because the fellows will essentially have a two-week guided tour of the country, and of course the majority of our time will be spent working in schools, I am excited to see not what I expect but what emerges from the experience.