By Simone Moss

In what feels like a blink of an eye, our time in Senegal ended. We saw everything from rural villages to modern compounds, from the coastline to the desert. But, through any visible change in the environment around us, the people of Senegal stayed consistent. 

The same consistency ran through the physical openness in Kecouta’s compound; just as it did in P-Boy’s community sports center, just as it electrified the crowd at our first Ajel de Rufisque game, or even in Souleymane’s 25/8 lifestyle. 

It’s not a coincidence that the consistency of belonging and giving back steadily radiate through Senegal. For example, at the same moment that the president of Ajel de Rufisque is helping thousands of Senegalese students attend university in Europe, he is also making an effort to connect socially with everyone involved in his club team’s space by playing at local matches with fans and friends alike. 

Ajel de Rufisque is a top level soccer club. We went to watch their home match by chance and were immediately drawn into the crowd, where they helped us learn dances and drumming. We forged friendships in the stands. Ajel is a soccer club in a sprawling rural town – something between a village and a city, as if Niognani and Dakar had a baby. The infrastructure is sports – the thing that brings everything together. Life around basketball courts and soccer fields. We could watch it unfold as layers when we kept going back. Everyone we met on three separate visits to different parts of Rufisque kept showing us that what we experienced was not a coincide, it was the infrastructure of soccer. 

Ajel is to me the red and white team that is easy to love, with lots of dedicated fans and players. Leaving Rufisque for the last time was so different than first impressions. The city was a transcendent experience. It was the dopamine high of real physical movement. My brain felt like it no longer had a limit. Not exactly a headache, but an expansion of my brain where I felt I could see things I had never seen on the first visit.

Everyone contributes to the infrastructure of soccer in Rufisque – the fans give energy and rhythm, the players give their talent and sweat, the wealthy support the club and training centers. The whole system gives to everyone, including us, and accepts energy and support in whatever way you can offer it. We saw a different way of imagining community.

Professional soccer player Makhete Diop (P-Boy) is coming back to Rufisque to visit his family and see his team at home, while also donating his life earnings to building more infrastructure for early talent in Rufisque. He is one of the main sponsors for Ajel and built his legacy because of his love for Rufisque and his country as a whole. 

The biggest example of the sense of belonging and giving back would have to be Souleymane (different guy than my friend in my first blog post, oddly enough), who we met at our first Ajel game. After dancing with him and his friends in the crowd at the game, he invited us to come see the school he was the director at. We learned that aside from being the director of that school, he also helps with marketing for Ajel, along with 2 other businesses that he started and runs himself. Souleymane is just 34 but he has given so much to the people and place.

Everytime we saw him, I would joke with him and ask how there were enough minutes of the day for him to accomplish that much. You could imagine my surprise when he came to greet us outside of our van when we came to the soccer match that Blake, Maya, Anthony, and Finley played in on Friday night and revealed that he would also be playing. After watching him have fun and let loose with his friends on the fenced in turf field, I saw him as something different than just a man who had kept on inviting us to different places over and over again. I saw a man who has such an intense love for his community, and how he showed it by wanting to share every part of it with foreigners like us. 

Like all of the friends I made on this trip, the goodbye was hard. Him and 2 of his friends came to the house to gift all of our group brand new Ajel de Rufisque jerseys (we really did get the VIP treatment). He hung out with us for a long time before it was time to finally part ways. However, it was pretty rushed because after hanging out for an hour later than he probably should have, he needed to get going to his next commitment. It was such a fitting way to say goodbye to the man I see as a true embodiment of Senegal. 

Traveling through Senegal has taught me things beyond my level of comprehension, and it will probably take me a while to process everything I experienced. In the meantime, I’m so excited to hold onto my new friendships and be able to keep in touch with people that I now value as a friend and role model alike. 

If you don’t understand how people can feel like friends after just a short time together, or you can feel an intense love after so little time, I have two pieces of Senegalese advice. 1) open yourself up more 2) go out into the world on a global ed trip