Around 2pm on Thursday afternoon, my Gender and Development class left Dakar in two minivans. We were headed for Kaolack, a poor city even by Senegalese standards, in west-central Senegal (check out the Senegal map on the bottom right of this webpage). It used to be a successful peanut growing region, but then the peanut market plummeted in the 70s and 80s, leaving the region with limited means of survival. Consequently, it’s a hotspot of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a good place for a fieldtrip. Since the traffic was so congested, it took 4 hours to get to our rooms in Kaolack. We stayed on the upper story of a nice new building. A collection of woman’s organizations pooled resources to buy it, because they needed space for conferences and meetings. They turned the upstairs into
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