Today was our second to last day in Senegal and we spent it well. In the morning, many of us watched the sunrise from the main terrace of our Airbnb. Looking west over the Atlantic with the sun at your back, sunrises feel a bit disorienting. The color of the sky changes subtly. The shades of blue are more muted and pale. It’s not a squinting sunrise. Rather, the warm hug of Senegal lays its strong arms over your shoulders softly. Sitting there this morning, time moved slowly. I found myself thinking about this group, an eclectic mix of grade levels, backgrounds, and personalities. What opportunities stand before these students? What challenges? Who will they encounter in their lives? As an educator, the biggest question is simple: how might their futures play out?

Questions with answers in the future are confounding most of the time.

Here in Senegal, though, as several students have already mentioned, the future seems clear in a unique way. The answers to how the future of this country might play out feel inevitable. Not rushed, not forced. Much like a still sunrise looking west.

Here in Senegal, the future feels powerfully rooted. Rooted in a culture that has since perhaps its inception told those who came bearing goods or bearing arms the same simple answer – “Welcome. Here we believe in Teranga (hospitality). Here we know that your shiny trinkets and hostile ambitions will become grains of sand in the desert of our potential. Here WE are greater than you.”

This afternoon we visited Touba, the holy city of Sheikh Amadou Bamba. The Senegalese future is crystal clear in Touba, as factual as the decades of Mouride labor born out in the towering Lamp Fall or well-organized streets.

Sheikh Amadou Bamba is sometimes called a peacemaker. Or the Servant of the Messenger. Or a Saint. To me, he is the pole around which Senegalese society revolves – its political energy, its economic potential, its spiritual existence, its status. All of these things are rooted in Amadou Bamba’s teachings and the model he so insisted on. When you visit Touba, they also flow so visibly back toward Bamba’s resting place.

The most significant poles of human societies are ancient – Varanasi for the Hindus, Meccah for the Muslims, and even Jerusalem. Some retain their original significance but much has changed in these foundational locations since their inception. For the Mourides and the Sufis who mirror their ascendance and persistence within Senegal, the pole of Touba and Amadou Bamba are familiar to the time we’re currently living in (92% of Senegalese Muslims belong to the Mouride brotherhood or one of its “cousins”). When we visited Touba last week (today was the second visit for some of us), we met Bamba’s grandson. The origin story is that recent.

Visiting a pole, a center around which so much of the life of this country revolves, that is still evolving, still in its nascent stage, is powerful. Today, we watched thousands of Baye Falls carrying food and singing Bamba’s poems through the streets. We were passed on the highway by the cars of Senegal’s true elite, many of them headed for Friday prayers in Bamba’s mosque. The future of Senegal was right before us, so evident in the momentum of construction, development, and identity.

Bamba preached a few central tenets to the Mourides:

1. Hard work is essential to personal growth and community health
2. The Jihad of the self is the only Jihad – enlightenment and growth are internal struggles, not battles for supremacy
3. Peace is the desired state of being, to which we must all commit ourselves
4. Education is the universal tool all humans need
5. We are all welcome, regardless of race or background, to come together
6. Doing good in the world requires skills and experience, both of which are best learned in community with each other

Each of these is evident in the image of Senegal’s future one must confront when spending time here. The way that Senegalese culture, rightfully known for its hospitality and the strength of its people, has embraced these tenets sets the country apart. There are not two Senegals.

I encourage all of you to learn more about Amadou Bamba and the way he confronted the French, instilled his tenets in society, stood shoulder to shoulder with more famous 21st-century thinkers in his devotion to non-violence and commitment to others, wrote more pages of poetry and thinking that any human in history (7.5 tons!), and generally established himself and his place as a pole. Very few history books even mention him. Many history teachers don’t even know he existed. But the future here, bright as it is, would not have existed without him. 5 million pilgrims visit his tomb during a single two-day pilgrimage each year. Those in the know know that he wrote more words on paper than any human in history. There’s little need to squabble about his significance.

One just needs to open one’s eyes, ideally with the warm sun on your back or just about to drop over the horizon in the evening, when the Senegalese dust and haze allows you to stare right at the sun. The future is unmistakable.