Culture . 03/12/2008 02:10 AM . Jake Melville

This is a story about globalization.

As an abstract concept, I’m familiar with the idea. Technological advances make the transfer of people, goods, and ideas across national boundaries easier and faster than ever before. I’ve read Tom Friedman’s books The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, discussed them with friends (at your school you discuss 18th Century German Romanticism, at George Washington University we discuss the implications of Kosovo’s declaration of independence for US policy in Iraq). But this is a story about how that abstract concept solidified into something concrete, something tangible.

This is a story about how Tom Friedman’s favorite political, economic, and cultural process converged, accosted me one night in a dark alley, and ran me over with its brand new Lexus.

It happened one bright, moon-lit night in the alley outside my host family’s house in Dakar, Senegal.

I was returning from the house of another toubab (white person) where I had spent the evening doing whatever it is that toubabs studying abroad do (most likely, this involved trying to stop little kids from climbing all over you while you attempted to eat dinner). I returned to my house to find the gate to the courtyard locked. I rang the doorbell, and as I was waiting for someone to come open the door, a man approached me from down the alley.

I don’t know why he stopped. The Senegalese take special pride in their hospitality, or terranga as they call it, but it doesn’t usually include stopping to talk to random toubabs at 11:00 at night.

We exchanged the obligatory greetings, “How are things? How are you doing? How is the night? Alhumdulilahi!” (You think I’m exaggerating, I have the class notes to prove that we spent no less than six weeks learning different ways to greet people in our Wolof language classes). After these pleasantries, we struck up a conversation.

Abu was his name, and when he found out I was American, he asked me where I lived.

“New York City,” I told him. It was a lie, of course; I live in a small town in Connecticut. But Harlem has a vibrant community of Senegalese immigrants, and most of the people I met knew a relative or two who lived there. Tiny Connecticut had almost no conceptual meaning to most people I met, and it became invariably easier to tell people I was just from New York, rather than explaining that Connecticut was near the city.

“Really?” he said. “I used to live in White Plains.” This in and of itself wasn’t that strange, Abu was obviously at one time a member of the Senegalese Diaspora in New York.

“Well, I don’t actually live in New York,” I told him. “I live right by New York, in Connecticut.” This was a safe bet. You might not know Connecticut very well if you live in White Plains, but you know it exists. White Plains is about 10 minutes from the state border.

“Oh, I used to live in Stamford,” he said.

Things were getting weird now. Stamford is 45 minutes from my house. Back at school, I would get off at the Stamford Amtrak station on my way home.

“Ok, then do you know Danbury?” I asked him. “I live right north of Danbury.”

“I used to work in Danbury!” he exclaimed.

Danbury is the closest major city to my town, though “major” is a bit of a stretch. Still, it has a “downtown,” the only mall for an hour in any direction, and our Congressional representative’s offices. So comparatively speaking, it counts. Weird as it was for this Senegalese man to have worked in Danbury, on some level it made sense. Danbury is primarily a city of immigrants. Granted most of them come from Latin America, but the odd West African didn’t seem too much of a stretch to me.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, I used to work in the Circuit City, right across from that big market…what was it called?”

“Stew Leonard’s?” I was incredulous.

“Yes!” he said. “Do you know it?”

“Do I know it?” Circuit City sits smack dab between my town, Brookfield, and Danbury. I had tried to get a job at that Circuit City. I had friends who worked at Circuit City. I even hang out at the Borders next door on a regular basis.

“Sure I know it. I live in Brookfield,” I said. “By the Four Corners, with the four gas stations at the one intersection.”

“Up the Super Seven?” Abu asked. “If you turn left after you get off instead of turning right to go to For Corners, my office is in that plaza.”

That declaration was sufficient to freak me out. I get my hair cut in that plaza. My first job was washing dishes in that plaza. My favorite baseball card shop is in that plaza. I’ve walked home from that plaza. That’s how close it is to my house.

Here I was, sweating through my shirt in a dark alley in Dakar with Brookfield, Connecticut the furthest thing from my mind. Brookfield is everything Senegal is not. It’s overwhelmingly white and cold. Senegal is one of the world’s poorest countries. It’s GDP in 2006 was almost one tenth of Connecticut’s. Its position 15 degrees from the equator means that it gets “cold” when the thermometer hits 75 degrees (you’d be surprised, though, at how “cold” 75 degrees feels when the average temperature is around 90).

But there I was in Dakar, talking with a Senegalese man who not only knew my town (people who live in Connecticut don’t even know my town), but had worked close enough to my house that I was giving him directions on how to get there.

Tom Friedman thinks that globalization means that the world is getting flatter, that technology companies in India are able to provide customer support services to consumers in America. And up to that night, I agreed with him.

But now, I say that globalization means that on a bright night in a back alley in a third-world capital, I can run into a person who not only has worked in my tiny state, but who has lived a stone’s throw from my house. I say that globalization means the world is getting smaller, not flatter.

Jake Melville is a senior International Affairs major at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and Slate.


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